UNIVERSITEIT GENT
FACULTEIT POLITIEKE EN SOCIALE WETENSCHAPPEN
The Politics of Archaeology and Biblical Tourism
A case study of “the City of David” in Silwan
Wetenschappelijke verhandeling
Aantal woorden: 18.384
Robin De Boeck
MASTERPROEF MANAMA CONFLICT AND DEVELOPMENT
PROMOTOR: PROF. DR. Christopher Parker
COMMISSARIS: . Dorien Vanden Boer
ACADEMIEJAAR 2014– 2015
ABSTRACT
In Silwan, een dorp dat deel uitmaakt van het door Israël illegaal bezette Oost Jerusalem, is een niet-gouvernementele organisatie met de naam Elad al jaren bezig met een archeologische site om te vormen tot een toeristisch trekpleister. Door het gebruiken van een “wetenschappelijke” discours omtrent archeologie, en een “economisch” discours omtrent toeristische ontwikkeling, zijn deze religieus fundamentalistische kolonisten in Silwan in staat om de koloniale realiteit en hun nationalistisch religieuze gedachtegoed te verbergen voor het bredere publiek. Archeologie heeft een zekere geschiedenis van misbruikt te zijn geweest voor nationalistische, kolonialistische, kapitalistische en religieuze doeleinden. Deze ‘narratieve’ wetenschap is niet zo neutraal als sommige academici en het brede publiek zou willen geloven. Een plek omvormen tot een archeologische site is op zich een politieke daad. Welke laag het belangrijkste wordt geacht is een subjectief gegeven, en reflecteert dus ook een zekere politieke keuze en doelstelling. De geschiedenis van een natie, haar cultuur en bepaalde locaties inkapselen in een toeristische pleisterplaats is op zich niet louter economisch, maar ook een politieke daad. Dit leidt tot een situatie waarbij een plek die ooit diende als woongebied en openbare ruimte voor de oorspronkelijke Palestijnse bevolking, nu onder controle is van religieuze Israëlische kolonisten.
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Table of Content
1. Introduction p 3
2. Methodology p 5
3. The politics of archaeology p 7
3.1 What to do with the past? P 7
3.2 Archaeology and nationalism p 9
3.3 Archaeology and colonialism p 15
3.4 Archaeology and the Bible p 19
3.5 Archaeology and mass tourism p 23
4. Archaeology and biblical tourism in Occupied East Jerusalem p 24
4.1 A biblical Disneyland p 25
4.2 The other side of the tourist site p 31
4.3 A tale of two cities p 34
4.4 Digging deep p 37
5. Conclusion p 40
Bibliografie p 43
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1 Introduction “Yesterday is History, 'Tis so far away - Yesterday is Poetry - 'Tis Philosophy -
Yesterday is mystery - Where it is Today While we shrewdly speculate Flutter both away” Yesterday is History, Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) 1
The poem above illustrates two basic facts about history: the past is forever shrouded in mystery, inherently unknowable in its complete form, and therefore any attempt at reconstruction creates a form of discourse. It is considered the scientific duty of historians and archaeologists to construct such discourses about the past based on material evidence that exists in the present. This evidence, documents and material objects, have received their historical value first and foremost because they have outlived their original purpose and escaped complete destruction. Any reconstruction of the past is therefore based on very fragmentary evidence, of which the scarcity increases the further one attempts to go back into time. This means that every single discourse about the past is influenced by the environment in which it was created, as by the worldview of the person(s) who made and/or commissioned the reconstruction. It’s also very important to note that every discourse about the past is not only inherently incomplete and ideologically charged, it also always serves a certain purpose or different purposes. It is the aim of this paper to thoroughly analyse the different political usages of material relics from the past within a well defined part of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, namely the exploitation of the archaeological remains located in the Occupied East Jerusalem suburb of Silwan.
Located just outside the walls of what is commonly referred to as “the Old City” of Jerusalem, these archaeological remains serve a complex multitude of political purposes within the present conflict. Simply by naming this location “the City of David”, the contemporary space becomes identified with a very specific historical/biblical space, masking the contemporary reality by covering it with selective images of the past which happen to serve an Israeli-nationalist discourse. This is similar to the Western practice of using terms such as Mesopotamia and Near East as geographical areas for historical research, supplanting contemporary geographical categories like Iraq, the Levant or Mashrek. This practice has clear colonial ancestry and purpose, namely separating the native population from the historical heritage that surrounds them, allowing their history to be weaved into the grand narrative of “the rise of Western civilisation”, which subsequently legitimated
1 http://hellopoetry.com/poem/4071/yesterday-is-history/
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Western ownership and control over these archaeological remains and the countries in which they were located.2
As George Orwell wrote in his visionary dystopian novel 1984 “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”.3 In Silwan, Jewish settlers from the rightwing Israeli NGO Elad are in control of archaeological remains and their representation towards the global public of mass tourists. This contemporary situation did not originate in a vacuum but is the direct result of Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and its surrounding villages in 1967, and subsequent Israeli policies in this newly acquired territory.
From the viewpoint of International Law (UNSCR 242)4, this annexation was and remains illegal and East Jerusalem should therefore be viewed as illegally occupied Palestinian territory. Since the 4th Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits the transfer of civilian populations into occupied territory5, any Israeli citizen who chooses to live in this area should be considered an illegal colonist or settler. However this is not how the Israeli state views the situation. According to the official Israeli perspective since 1980, there is only one Jerusalem and it is considered an integral part of the state of Israel functioning as its eternal and exclusive capital. The most obvious problem with this viewpoint is that it doesn’t match the reality on the ground, since Palestinians still have an overwhelming demographic majority in the occupied territories of East Jerusalem. Several official policies initiated by the Israeli state and the Jerusalem Municipality are clearly aimed at altering the current facts on the ground in order to turn its own legislative fiction, of an undivided Jerusalem as the exclusive capital of a Jewish Israeli state, into an undisputed reality.6 It is this overarching political goal, of trying to alter the demographic realities in Occupied East Jerusalem in favour of Jewish Israeli settlers, which guides the activities of both Elad and Israeli public authorities in Silwan.
Having identified the Judaization of East Jerusalem as a common goal for both religious Israeli settlers and the Israeli state, it is the aim of this paper to thoroughly analyse the political processes and actors involved in the attempt to establish or resist such a new reality. By applying a methodology based on Actor-Network Theory, combining literary research with my personal experiences and interviews on the ground, I shall attempt to clarify the complex web of actor-networks which have manifested themselves around the archaeological remains located in Silwan. Hereby
2 Zainab BAHRANI (1998); Conjuring Mesopotamia: imaginative geography and a world past; in L. MESKELL (ed.); p 162 3 G. ORWELL (1949); 1984; Penguin books Ltd. London; p 40 4 Resolution 242 (November 1967); Especially where it demands “Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict; http://unispal.un.org/UNISPAL.NSF/0/7D35E1F729DF491C85256EE700686136 ; Consulted on 31/06/2015 5 Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention (August 1949), to which Israel is a signatory state since July 1951, explicitly states “The Occupying Power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.”; https://www.icrc.org/ihl/WebART/380-600056; Consulted on 10/08/2015 6 Y. JABAREEN (2010); The politics of state planning in achieving geopolitical ends: The case of the recent master plan for Jerusalem ;International Development Planning Review 32; pp 27–43 F. CHIODELLI (2012); The Jerusalem Master Plan: Planning into the Conflict; Jerusalem Quarterly nr. 51; pp 5-20
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not only analysing how Israeli private organisations and public authorities closely cooperate in order to attain the same goal, but also how other actors and agencies arise in an attempt to resist this ongoing development, which will simultaneously illustrate the imbalances of power between these actor-networks.
Special attention will be given to the complex roles of archaeology and mass tourism within this ongoing political struggle. Both concepts possessing a long history within Western discourse of being represented as activities that symbolise progress, successfully disguising the fact that both practices more often than not involve appropriating land from its original inhabitants. Their impact is always political in the sense that they redefine spatial use and functions, for example from residential space to archaeological or commercial space.
In this paper I shall contend that settlers connected to the Elad Foundation have successfully adopted certain discourses and practices associated with archaeology and mass tourism, with the intention of normalising their illegal presence in view of the millions of tourists who have visited this site since it became under their control in 2003. By representing themselves as curators of important historical artefacts, and as an organisation which has successfully transformed these ancient stones into modern cash machines, religious fundamentalist Israeli settlers in Silwan are masking the colonial reality and the religious ideology which are fuelling their illegal presence in the first place.
2 Methodology
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in ’t.” Polonius; Hamlet William Shakespeare
Any researcher inevitably finds himself standing on the shoulders of intellectual giants, three of them deserve explicit mentioning here: Michel Foucault, Edward Saïd and Bruno Latour. From Michel Foucault I borrow his structuralist approach and the concept of critical genealogy. Through his historical research into the genealogy of certain concepts and discourses, he uncovered a relation between the evolution of discourses and certain power relations.7 Edward Saïd had used a similar method and developed the concept of oriëntalism, a discourse with its own genealogy of images and concepts, which essentially reflected underlying colonial power relations.8
My previous master being in history, I had already adopted the concepts of critical geneaology and Orientalism as analytical frameworks in the context of historical research. This being the first time I attempted to analyse an ongoing conflict by combining literary study with fieldwork, I needed a new methodological framework for gathering information. For this I was inspired by Bruno Latour’s introduction to
7 M. FOUCAULT (1975); Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison 8 E. SAID (1978); Oriëntalism
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Actor-Network theory.9 One of the main advantages of ANT is that it allows us to trace less obvious connections between actors and the local site, while simultaneously uncovering non-human elements as actors. Another important aspect of ANT is that it recognises actors as active mediators instead of mere passive intermediaries. This prohibits the researcher of too hastily jumping to all encompassing theoretical conclusions and explanations, which subsequently allows only a passive/intermediary role for the actors involved.
One of the central tenets of ANT is that it follows the actors wherever they may take us. This means that actors will take central stage when gathering data on the ground. First step is to examine who/what are the actors involved, followed by a research into their motivations, actions and interconnectedness. Here it is important that actors themselves provide the explanations for their actions, which can afterwards be critically examined by the researcher. Once an inventory of all possible actors and their agency has been established, it then becomes possible to trace the origins of their respective narratives and actions, using critical genealogy to connect them to wider issues. Thus it is the aim of my fieldwork to reconstruct a “spider web” of connections with the City of David at its centre, to empirically canvas the different connections between this local site, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the wider world.
In practice this meant that my research started with identifying which elements should be taken into account as actors. These are, as previously mentioned, not limited to human beings and their organisations, but also include material objects such as roads, parking lots, a bus or the archaeological artefacts on display. Central questions were “what are these actors doing here?”, “how do these actors influence the situation on the ground and why?”. I occasionally interviewed persons I had identified as actors in order to get such data.
Another key question focuses on group formation. Groups are in essence artificial constructions and do not exist without actions that sustain and continue group formation and identity. For instance, people from around the world come to the City of David which turns them instantaneously into a group of tourists. But how are these groups constructed? Where do these individuals come from? How did they get there? And most importantly, why? The answers to these questions will allow us to further distinguish between different “groups” of tourists based on their motivations, actions and backgrounds. Continuing with the example of the “groups” of tourists, once the different motivations, mediations and backgrounds have been analysed, critical genealogy can be used to put their different narratives into a wider perspective. If for instance Evangelical Christians turn out to be a consistent group of tourists at the City of David, then we can connect their individual motivations and perspectives to a much broader history and narrative, while differentiating them from other viewpoints and connections.
Using ANT turned out to be a challenge, and made researching this subject much more complex, but the added value was that it kept my attention to the situation on the ground. I returned from fieldwork with an immense amount of new sources and data, the callenge then being to knit them all together in a comprehensive discourse. But one of my first realisation during my research was a clear connection between
9 B. LATOUR (2005); Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor Network Theory
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archaeology and , nationalism, colonialism, the Bible, and mass tourism. I then researched how such connections had historically manifested themselves before in order to better understand the wider issues. Since it’s vital to understand these connections in order to better interpret the situation on the ground, this overview shall be given before the analyses of my case study.
My case study itself will be presented not as a chronological story of my research, but as a tour around the physical space of “the City of David” in Silwan. Starting as a tourist myself, I’ll describe the tourist site, combined with interviews I had with other tourists on site, and an account of the guided tour of Elad. I’ll then follow the tourist trail away from the archaeological remains to encounter some Palestinian perspectives on the current situation. This will bring us in contact with leftwing Israeli NGO’s, after which we’ll come full circle at the entrance of the tourist site for an interview with the Director for International Affairs of the IR David Foundation (Elad). Although its chronology will be a literary construct, my narrative will reflect the reality on the ground as I encountered it. While I do believe that the absolute truth of a matter is inherently unknowable, this doesn’t mean that every discourse is equally valid, they should all be judged on their internal logic as well as by their correct reflection of the reality on the ground.
3 The politics of archaeology
3.1 What to do with the past?
“It is important to recognize, however, that although we, as archaeologists, are not politicians, our work is always political.” Katina T. Lillios10
In contrast to what has become a common English expression, the past is not a foreign country, a place one can physically visit and get directly acquainted with, it more resembles a distant galaxy, only observable by catching its distorted echo. ‘While 19th century positivism had convinced historians and archaeologists alike to believe that it was their duty, in the words of Leopold von Ranke, to “tell what had actually happened”, post-modernism has uncovered this as an inherently impossible goal. We can never fully reconstruct the past, but we can attempt to study its impact on the present.’11
History and archaeology are not exact sciences but interpretive ones. Their conclusions are not based on repeatable scientific experiments, performed somewhere in sterile laboratories, but rely mostly on subjective interpretations of a selection of historical evidence which has randomly survived until the present day. This evidence,
10 P. KOHL and C. FAWCETT (ed.) (1995); Nationalism, politics and the practice of archaeology; p 68 11 L. OLIVIER (2008); Le sombre abîme du temps; pp 150-151
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documents and material objects, have received their historical value first and foremost because they have outlived their original purpose and accidentally escaped complete destruction. Any attempt at reconstructing the past is therefore based on very fragmentary evidence, of which the scarcity increases exponentially the further one attempts to go back into time. This means that every attempt at reconstructing the past will be influenced by the environment in which it is created, as well as by the worldview of the person(s) who’s making or commissioning the reconstruction. Any narrative based on historical or archaeological research becomes therefore a type of discourse and should be analysed as such.
But what is the function of historical narratives for societies in general? In other words, how and why is knowledge about the past used in the present? Long before the scientific revolution, which elevated history and archaeology as distinctive types of “scientific knowledge”, discourses about the past were commonly used to explain and/or legitimate the present status quo. In imperial China for instance, historiography was an important tool to legitimate new ruling dynasties, proving that the “heavenly mandate” had been transferred from one family to the other.12 This is just one obvious example of how historical narratives can be utilised for political purposes, and as we shall see, this particular political usage of the past, as a tool for legitimising contemporary power relations, has remained very common until the present day.
Archaeologists can never be completely neutral nor objective “scientists”, especially not in the 19th century positivist understanding of the word. Each has their own ideological background, their own interpretation of history, their own preferred layer to investigate. It is therefore highly important that individual archaeologists are at the very least aware and honest about the influences emanating from their own ideological perspectives, which will always have some kind of reflection on their archaeological interpretations and conclusions. Even more important, archaeologists have to at least attempt to be aware of how their work will impact the contemporary societies which provide the living context of his or her work, to acknowledge that their work inherently possesses political qualities and functions. ‘Since space is both political and strategic, the design and organization of space is a political and strategic activity.’13 By redefining certain spaces as representing a specific time-period, but not another, archaeologists reconstruct both spatial identity and its usage, influencing how both past and space are being used in the present.
Archaeological excavations last for several months, if not years, are very labour intensive, and therefore require significant financial funds over large periods of time. This means that one also has to take into account who is funding archaeological excavations and their motivations for doing so. Answering these questions can uncover other non-academic actors at play in the field of archaeology, who’s motives are rarely purely of a scientific nature. It would be intellectually dishonest if scientists of any subject deny any responsibility towards how their work is used or abused by those who have funded it. Just as the scientists who were involved in the Manhatan Project had to be aware that they were working for the military during wartime, and that their work would then eventually lead to the creation of a weapon with unseen
12 Lecture by professor Ruddy Doom during his course “The 3rd world in historical perspective”; Academic year 2003-2004; Kandidatuur in de Geschiedenis, Universiteit Gent 13 F. CHIODELLI (2012); The Jerusalem Master Plan: Planning into the Conflict; Jerusalem Quarterly nr.51; p5
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destructive capabilities, archaeologists have to be aware about how their work will be used after they’ve finished with their “scientific duty”.14
By now it should be very clear that the praxis of archaeology is inherently political, but before I start with the analyses of my case study, it is important to first point out how archaeology has already been used for certain types of political goals in the past. Such an overview will enable us to put my case study into a much broader perspective, subsequently not treating “the City of David” as something exceptional, but as the particular manifestations of different political usages of archaeological remains, all of which have their relevant historical precedents. As Mark Twain pointed out “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”, by uncovering certain underlying historical processes, one can at least attempt to find an answer as to how and why this is the case. In what follows, I shall therefore attempt to clarify the symbiotic relationships which have arisen between archaeology and, nationalism, colonialism, the Bible, and mass tourism. It’s important to keep in mind that these connections are not distinctively separate from one another but can appear simultaneously and in different combinations, as I contend they currently do at “the City of David” in Silwan.
3.2 Archaeology and nationalism
"We have made Italy. Now we have to make Italians." Massimo d'Azeglio, 186115
“In Iraq there is still (…) no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic ideal, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie.” King Faisal of Iraq, 193216
“You take a bunch of people who don't seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem.” Vimes; Monstrous Regiment Terry Pratchett, 2003
As the quotes above illustrate, I believe that the creation of a nation state leads to the creation of “a nation” within its borders, not the other way around. Following the footsteps of Anderson17, Gellner18, and Hobsbawm19, I perceive nationalisms, nation states, and the nations they pretend to represent, as modern political constructs and imagined communities with no primordial origins. Since, nationalism, “the nation”,
14 Interview with Raphael Greenberg 20/04/2014 15 As cited in E. HOBSBAWM (1992); Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Cambridge University Press; p 44 16 As cited in M. BERNHARDSSON (2007); The Sense of Belonging: The Politics of Archaeology in Modern Iraq; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; p 189 17 B. ANDERSON (1983); Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and Spread of Nationalism; Verso ;London 18 E. GELLNER (1983); Nations and Nationalism; Blackwell 19 E. HOBSBAWM (1992); Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Cambridge University Press
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and “the nation state” are relatively recent phenomena, ‘there is today simply no nation in the world which can claim to have an unbroken existence since time immemorial, no matter how ancient some particular cultural elements within it may prove to be’20. As Gellner pointed out, “Nations as a natural, God-given way of classifying men, as an inherent political destiny, are a myth; nationalism, which sometimes takes pre-existing cultures and turns them into nations, sometimes invents them, and often obliterates pre-existing cultures: that is a reality.”21
It’s important to underline that the present day connection between “a nation” and a particular language, ethnicity or culture was not originally part of nationalist theories during the classical period of liberal nationalism. First developed in revolutionary USA and France, the nation state, a state ruled by “the nation” (We the people) instead of a dynastic family, was initially seen as the next stage of human development, as the natural increase in scale of human social units: “from family and tribe to county and canton, from the local to the regional, the national and eventually the global. (…) In theory this meant that national movements were expected to be movements for national unification or expansion.”22
Throughout the 19th century however, the concept of “the nation” changed drastically under the influence of German Romanticism, which established the idea of “a mystical identification of nationality with a sort of platonic vision of language, existing behind and above all its variant and imperfect versions”23. As was clearly the case during the French Revolution, to speak French was not initially a necessity to be considered a Frenchmen, since hardly anybody in France spoke that language yet. The French nation was first and foremost connected to the territory of the state and the laws to which to obey within those borders. ‘This is why Sephardic Jews who spoke medieval Spanish, and Ashkenazi Jews who spoke Yiddish were considered equally French, once they accepted the conditions of French citizenship, which also included speaking French. But by the end of the 19th century it was argued that Dreyfus could not be a real Frenchmen since he was from Jewish decent, thus drastically redefining the concept of what it meant to be a French citizen.’24 To belong to “a nation” was no longer dependent on being born in the territory of a nation state and adhering to its laws, but became redefined as being a member of a certain ethnicity, culture or religion. It changed from being a progressive and inclusive concept, which was explicitly focussed on a brighter future for mankind in general, towards a conservative and exclusive definition, one which obsessively gazes into in the mists of time in search for mystical connections with imagined ancestors.
Inspired by this new ethno-linguistic definition of nationality, different nationalisms arose across Europe during the course of the 19th century, some demanding to have their own nation state. This was often a reaction against the process of nation-building by large multicultural states, which also included imposing “a national language” onto a linguistically diversified population. This new definition of nationalism triumphed
20 R. RATNAGAR (2007); The Aryan Homeland Debate in India; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; p 353 21 E. GELLNER (1983); Nations and Nationalism; pp 48-49 22 E. HOBSBAWM (1992); Nations and Nationalism since 1780; p 33 23 Ibid. p57 24 Ibid. p 22
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by the end of WWI, carving up the map of Europe through inconsistently adopting the Wilsonian principle of “the right to self-determination of peoples”. Thus the newly defined nation state spread throughout Europe, and was subsequently exported across the globe during the period of decolonisation. This was partly the case because most colonial liberation movements were lead by an indigenous Western educated elite, who saw adapting Western discourses and theories surrounding nationalism and national liberation as the best way of advancing their cause.25 The idea that the whole planet is now divided in distinctive nation states is now even institutionalised through the existence of a global intergovernmental organisation: the United Nations. The independent nation state however, having inherited certain crucial institutions from its predecessor the dynastic or colonial state, such as a standing army, organised bureaucracy, system of minting and taxation, etcetera, still needed new symbols to represent itself in the material world, such as: a national flag, a national anthem, national athletes and… a national history.
Before the rise of the nation state, historiography had been mainly focussed on the genealogy and successes of ruling dynastic families, hereby legitimising their rule. National histories serve a similar function, namely explaining, and hereby legitimising, the existence of the nation state and its current borders. From this perspective, the nation state is represented as the ultimate development of “a people” or “a nation”, consequently ignoring, minimising or even destroying the cultural differences which exist(ed) within those borders throughout the passage of time. This resulted in a situation where the borders of the nation state became both the spatial categories of historical research and what historical research ultimately legitimises. As did historians, archaeologists made essential contributions towards the creation of such national histories and mythologies.
In this context of developing a collective history (or rather a national mythology) for newly formed nation states, archaeology is often recruited to help create an imagined direct connection between prehistoric cultures and current populations. As Bruce Trigger has rightly pointed out: “Under the impetus of nationalism, archaeology abandoned a primary focus on evolution and concentrated on interpreting the archaeological record as the history of specific peoples. This resulted in the development of culture-historical archaeology. Archaeological cultures were defined and many were identified as prehistoric manifestations of historically known peoples, whose development and movements could be traced in the archaeological record. European archaeologists sought to lengthen the pedigrees of their own national or ethnic groups and to glorify these groups by comparison with neighbouring peoples. Usually this took the form of identifying a particular people with a succession of specific archaeological cultures leading into the remote past and drawing special attention to the special achievements of these cultures.”26
One of the most glaring problems with this culture-historical approach is the misguided conflation between a material culture as identified in the archaeological record, such as pottery, decoration-motives, tools, production methods, with cultural elements which are today used to identify and separate one ethnicity from another, as in language, religion, cultural traditions, and so on. There is simply no logical reason
25 Ibid. p 136 26 B. TRIGGER (1995); Romanticism, nationalism, and archaeology; in P. KOHL and C. FAWCETT (ed.); Nationalism, politics and the practice of archaeology; p 269
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to assume that any of the above have a consistent or continuous overlap with one another or with a distinctive group of people over a long period of time, simply because none are genetically hereditary qualities and can all, at least in theory, be learned by human beings from any other cultural background or ethnic origin. Only a very selective reading of the immensely fragmented archaeological record could lead to a view of the past where cultures (production methods, cultural traditions, languages, religions, etcetera) all evolved neatly and distinctively separate from one another within clearly distinctive groups of people, supposedly until the onset of modernity brought with it “the horrors of a multicultural society”. Claiming unbroken lineage between “ancient monolithic cultures” and present day “monocultural nations” is therefore in my view completely misguided, if not flat out wrong and fabricated.
The problematic relationship between nationalism and archaeology has become a subject of increasing academic scrutiny by scholars from a variety of disciplines.27 The resulting studies are full of examples that illustrate how nationalistic interpretations of archaeology have lead to either gross misinterpretation or even manipulation of available data28, dubious territorial claims29, and in some extreme cases even helped to legitimate ethnic cleansing30.
The relationship between archaeology and nationalism is however not inevitably negative. When a clear distinction is made between nationality and ethnicity, an inclusive nationalist interpretation of the past has the potential to celebrate the diversity of a modern nation state’s (cultural) history. But when nationality and
27 P. KOHL and C. FAWCETT (ed.) (1995); Nationalism, politics and the practice of archaeology L. MESKELL (ed.) (1998); Archaeology under fire: nationalism, politics and heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East; P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.) (2007); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts 28 L. OLIVIER (2008); Le sombre abîme du temps; p 179 (for an example from 19th century France) B. WAILES and A. ZOLL (1995); “Civilization, barbarism, and nationalism in European archaeology”; in P. KOHL and C. FAWCETT (ed.); pp 25-34 (for an example from the British Isles) M. DIAZ-ANDREU (1995); “Archaeology and nationalism in Spain”; in Ibid.; 1995; pp 41-49 (for examples from Spain) K. LILLIOS (1995); “Nationalism and Copper Age research in Portugal during the Salazar regime (1932-1974)”; in Ibid.; pp 57-68 (for an example from Portugal) B. ARNOLD and H. HASSMAN (1995); Archaeology in Nazi Germany; in Ibid.; pp 70-81 (for examples from Nazi Germany) T. KAISER (1995); Archaeology and ideology in southeast Europe; in Ibid.; pp 99-113 (for examples from Balkan countries) E. TONG (1995); Thirty years of Chinese archaeology (1949-1979); in Ibid.; pp 183-190 (for examples from China) S. NELSON (1995); The politics of ethnicity in prehistoric Korea; in Ibid.; pp 218-231 (for examples from Korea) C. FAWCETT (1995); Nationalism and postwar Japanese archaeology; in Ibid.; pp 241-246 (for an example from Japan) 29 T. KAISER (1995); Archaeology and ideology in southeast Europe; in Ibid.; pp 113-119 (for examples from Balkan countries) V. SHNIRELMAN (1995); Soviet archaeology in the 1930s and 1940s; in Ibid.; pp 133-138 (for examples from the USSR and the Russian Federation) P. KOHL and G. TSETSKHLADZE (1995); Nationalism, politics, and the practice of archaeology in the Caucasus; in Ibid.; pp 149-169 (for examples from Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia) 30 B. ARNOLD & H. HASSMANN (1995); Archaeology in Nazi Germany: the Legacy of the Faustian bargain; in Ibid.; pp 70 – 81 (for examples from Nazi-Germany)
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ethnicity/culture are conflated, a nationalistic interpretation of the archaeological record could ultimately lead to legitimising ethnic cleansing, as was clearly the case in Nazi-Germany and during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia. By constructing the very dubious claim, supported by findings in the archaeological record, that a certain ethnicity has historical rights to a certain piece of territory, certain basic rights then become dependent on belonging to a particular ethnicity or not. Meaning that belonging to an ethnicity, not your place of birth, will decide if you truly belong to a certain space or are foreign to it. Constructing an unbroken lineage between ancient cultures and their “modern inheritors” is therefore not only scientifically inaccurate, but also potentially dangerous.
The entire history of the human species being one of continuous flows of migrations, all of which at some point started from the African continent, each of which causing new interactions leading towards cultural changes, there simply is today no group of people that can claim an unbroken connection to a certain space on earth since time immemorial. Every present day ethnicity/nation is simply a temporary manifestation of something which is undergoing constant changes and modifications, none of which happen in a vacuum. Direct connections between prehistoric cultures and modern ethnicities/nations are therefore purely modern constructs, they don’t exist on some platonic level but need to be continuously and actively reproduced in the present in order to survive. Present day conflicts about borders of nation states, and ownership of land by certain groups of people, should therefore be settled first and foremost based on living memory, and using the present judicial system of International and Humanitarian Law, not the ill-defined borders of an obscure and ancient past.
Zionism itself first originated as a Jewish variant of Romantic European nationalism by the end of the 19th century. This development was mainly in defence of the new racist justification behind European nationalisms. By redefining “the nation” as a culturally homogenous group of people, Jews first became excluded from being full citizens of the newly defined European nation states. To create a nation state of their own, based on the same racist principles which caused them to be discriminated in the first place, apparently seemed like a legitimate solution for a certain segment of the Jewish population in Europe, and also fitted perfectly into the general sentiment of the time, when colonialism and racist theories were about to enter their peak.31
One of the largest challenges for the Zionist movement is still the fact that “people can identify themselves as Jews even though they share neither religion, language, culture, tradition, historical background, blood-group patterns nor an attitude to the Jewish state.”32 Since Judaism has undergone many changes throughout the centuries, having naturally lead to a huge diversity in the human population that self-identifies as Jews, national commonality had to be created in order to successfully establish a Jewish nation state. The commonalities which then later arose were guided by a necessity to connect European Jews with the new territory which the Zionist movement had received through the Balfour Declaration. This explains why the early Zionist movement opted to invent a new national language in the form of modern Hebrew, a language nobody spoke yet, instead of choosing Yiddish, which is linguistically a Germanic language, and was at the time spoken by a substantial
31 E. HOBSBAWM (1992); Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Cambridge University Press; p 47 32 Ibid.; p 8
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majority of all the world’s Jews.33 Hebrew, although significantly altered and adapted to modern times, could give some sense of continuity and legitimacy to the Jews arriving in Palestine, since this was the territory where the now dead classical Hebrew had once thrived in a very distant past.
As in any newly formed nation state, archaeology also played a crucial role in helping to shape such a new Israeli national identity, connecting citizens directly to the state and its territory. As we have seen, such “national histories” are more often than not based on romantic visions of an imagined and therefore mythical past. Nachman Ben- Yehuda has, for instance, written extensively on how archaeological excavations at Masada between 1963 and 1965 were consistently used to advance a mythical narrative concerning an imagined heroic last stand of “the Jewish people”, in clear contradiction with the known historical account.34 It’s important to note that the Masada myth, which is a political and ideological narrative, was supported by archaeology “not by falsifying any of the actual finds or artefacts, but rather by contextualising these findings within the mythical narrative.”35
The potential power of archaeology, to connect colonisers from different backgrounds and nationalities to their newly found soil, was clearly not lost on the early leaders of the Zionist movement and the subsequent Israeli state. “During the 1950’s and 1960’s, biblical archaeology was considered to be part of Israel’s “civil religion” and was even hailed as “the national pastime” of the newly established state.”36 According to Michael Feige, this can be identified as the first stage of Israeli national archaeology, which started to wane during the 1970’s.37 The gradual decrease of popular interest in archaeology was most likely caused by its very success at contributing to the project of nation-building, its popularity having first arisen during the 1920’s out of a then existential need to connect a growing diverse population of Jewish immigrants to their newfound homeland and with each other. 38 By the 1970’s, this process had been so successful that both state and general populace seemed to have gradually lost interest in archaeology.
But as Feig has pointed out, there seems to currently be an ongoing 2nd stage of Israeli national archaeology. In contrast with the 1st stage, it’s focussed on archaeological sites inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and it’s not supported by secular
33 Ibid. p 110 34 N. BEN-YEHUDA (1995); The Masada Myth: Collective Memory and Mythmaking in Israel; Madison: University of Wisconsin Press N. BEN-YEHUDA (1998); “Where Masada’s Defenders Fell”; Biblical Archaeology Review 24; No. 6 (Nov-Dec): pp 32-39 N. BEN-YEHUDA (2002); Sacrificing Truth: Archaeology and the Myth of Masada; New York: Prometheus Press N. BEN-YEHUDA (2007); “Excavating Masada: the Politics-archaeology Connection at Work”; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; pp 247-276 35 N. BEN-YEHUDA (2007); “Excavating Masada: the Politics-archaeology Connection at Work”; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; p 273 36 M. FEIGE (2007); “Recovering Authenticity: West-Bank Settlers and the 2nd Stage of National Archaeology”; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); p 277 37 Ibid. 38 U. BARAM (2007); Appropriating the past: Heritage, tourism, and archaeology in Israel; in Ibid. ; p 304
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Israeli citizens but by religious Israeli settlers.39 What both stages have in common though is a clear focus on Biblical archaeology to support an Israeli nationalist narrative and subsequent territorial claims. But before we delve deeper into the subject of Biblical archaeology, I’ll first attempt to clarify the symbiotic relationship which can exist between archaeology and colonialism, this being the original context in which Biblical archaeology originated and developed.
3.3 Archaeology and colonialism
“When the British Army of Occupation marched into Egypt in 1882, that country most unexpectedly became the object of thought of every intelligent thinker of Europe and of every English-speaking nation throughout the world. The diplomat, the soldier and the politician each looked upon Egypt with a practical eye, and mediated what advantage could be got from it for the country which he represented (…) But others besides the practical men were interested in the opening up of Egypt by the British – we mean the student of general history and the archaeologist, not to mention the expert Egyptologist (…) who flocked to Egypt demanded with no uncertain voice that all the available information of the subject should be given to them.”
Illustrated London News, 7 March 1896, accompanying coverage of de Morgan’s discoveries at Dahshur40
The quote above perfectly illustrates the intimate relationship that existed between archaeology and colonialism during the 19th century. This long lasting cooperation influences how archaeologists are represented and perceived by the general public until the present day. Evidence to this fact is the BBC documentary about Flinders Petrie titled “The Man Who Discovered Egypt”41. From the very beginning a link is made with Napoleon, “who had opened up Egypt half a century before Petrie was born”42. This “opening up of Egypt” was essentially the first manifestation of a colonial enterprise accompanied by a scientific arm, which functioned as “the rationalising mouthpiece of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798”43. The title of the documentary is by itself clear testament to a continued arrogance and racism entrapped within certain areas of Western discourse, assuming Egypt needed to be “discovered” and “opened up” by white Europeans.
The hero of this story, Flinders Petrie, was one of those men who had “flocked to Egypt” after the British occupation of 1882, his work being funded by the Egypt Exploration Society (est. 1882). The presenter of this hagiographic documentary, who happens to be the current director of the Egypt Exploration Society44, describes Petrie
39 M. FEIGE (2007); “Recovering Authenticity: West-Bank Settlers and the 2nd Stage of National Archaeology”; in Ibid.; pp 277-298 40 As cited in L. MESKELL (ed.) (1998); p 1 41 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015 42 Ibid.; 04:21-04:30 43 E. SAID (1993); Culture and Imperialism; p 38 44 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015; 11:06-11:18; Clearly no coincidence that its establishment was 1882, the year of the British occupation of Egypt.
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as a man who “bestrode the world like a colossus”45. This imagery clearly has colonial ancestry, as the following image testifies.
46
The British colonial project in Africa is represented above, one foot in Egypt the other in South Africa, he caries in his hands a symbol of progress: a telegraph wire, the most modern form of communication at the time. This perfectly illustrates that representing oneself as the conveyor of progress to an otherwise completely backward outer world was crucial to legitimise the European colonial project, known in French as “la mission civilisatrice”, the civilising mission.
This documentary about Flinders Petrie shows us indirectly that archaeologists perform a very similar function, legitimising the colonial project by representing it as a conveyor of science, progress and civilisation. While the presenter makes it very clear that tomb raiders and grave robbers are “the bad guys” of this story, he blatantly fails to make the well established connection between these persons and the increased Western interest in antiquities from the “Ancient Near East”47. These “antique dealers and tomb raiders who vandalised ancient sites in search for profit”48, were actually Petrie’s colleagues and creditors! The irony of the matter only increases later on in the documentary, when the presenter describes how “throughout his career, Petrie sent
45 Ibid.; 01:07-01:10 46 Punch Magazine; 10 December 1892; editorial cartoon accompanying announcement of Cecil Rhodes plan to extend the telegraph from Cairo to Cape Town; http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20759/20759-h/20759-h.htm; Last seen on 15/08/2015; It would be interesting to map out the genealogy of this expression. It is for instance also used in the movie Spartacus (1960), when Crassus admiring Rome exclaims “There, boy, is Rome. The might, the majesty, the terror of Rome. There is the power that bestrides the known world like a colossus.” 1:22:55-1:23:08 47 W. STIEBLING (1993); Uncovering the past: a history of archaeology; p 60 48 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015.; 10:20-10:24
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skeletons, skulls and bones” to his friend in London, who used them to advance the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and phrenology.49 This story is then followed up by the exploit of Petrie discovering mummies with painted portraits instead of burial masks. The presenter then mentions that “Many Hawara mummies came to Britain and are now on display in the British Museum. In 1888, the public clamoured to see them, and to buy them, so Petrie and his sponsors made a lot of money.”50 So clearly Petrie also transferred portable artefacts to British museums and private collections in exchange for money, thereby contributing to the “grave robbing for profit” which the presenter had denounced so vehemently at the beginning of the documentary.
As with Napoleon’s expedition, science and scientists were obviously used as legitimising ownership over a distant territory. To represent oneself as “the protector” and “discoverer” of another territory’s ancient and forgotten past clearly reflects a certain colonial and/or imperial power relation. It were for instance not Chinese or Arab “archaeologists” who came to Europe and started “digging out our forgotten past”, transferring for example Stonehenge to the National Museum of China in Beijing. However, throughout the 19th century and beyond, there was a prestigious European scramble for “Near Eastern” artefacts, especially between France and Britain. Both countries had established National Museums in their capital cities, with the clear intention to expropriate and collect all sorts of cultural artefacts from all over the world, transforming these ancient relics into modern symbols of imperial advancement and national prestige.51 Until this very day, many famous pieces of ancient art are still owned by these two institutions, which perfectly illustrates the mutual enforcing dynamics between nationalism, colonialism and archaeology. Here it deserves mentioning that a considerable amount of historical artefacts were either permanently damaged or irretrievably lost during this process.52
European ownership over the rest of the world was further legitimised by propagating a certain discourse about the general history of mankind, partly based on archaeological finds, which represented European civilisation as the final adult stage of the human species.53 According to this racist and euro-centric discourse, civilisation, which then becomes equated with the state and its institutions, originated in the “Near East”, namely in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, transferred to Ancient Greece and Rome, and subsequently to the modern nations of Europe. This discourse effectively disinherited native populations from the archaeological remains that surrounded them.
As Zainab Bahrani has rightly pointed out, the act of naming ancient cultures played a crucial role in this process: “This obsessive desire to disassociate the past from its present and to present it instead as a primitive stage in the evolution of mankind facilitated the concept of “Mesopotamia” as the rightful domain of the West, both in historical and a geopolitical sense. A separation and division of (Sumerian, Babylonian, and Assyrian) cultures and an exclusion of the later history of the region
49 Ibid.; 18:05-19:38 50 Ibid.; 22:15-22:30 51 N. SILBERMAN (1998); Whose game is it anyway?: The political and social transformations of American Biblical Archaeology; in L. MESKELL (ed.); Archaeology under fire: nationalism, politics and heritage in the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East; p 179 52 W. STIEBLING (1993); Uncovering the past: a history of archaeology; p 75 53 L. OLIVIER (2008); Le sombre abîme du temps; pp 45-46
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was successfully articulated through the act of naming.”54 This confirms Edward Saïd’s observation that: “The main battle in imperialism is over land, of course; but when it came to who owned the land, who had the right to settle and work on it, who kept it going, who won it back, and who now plans it’s future, these issues were reflected, contested, and even for a time decided in narrative.”55 By claiming to be the adult versions of these ancient civilisations, European nation states could also claim to be the rightful heirs to the material objects left behind by those civilisations.
It’s important to point out that archaeology didn’t only help to legitimate colonial projects, it also helped to normalise and disguise the colonial relationships themselves, even until this very day. Turning our attention back to “The Man Who Discovered Egypt”, the British occupation of Egypt is represented as a fortunate accident for Great Britain and its archaeologists: “Egypt was in political turmoil. (…) In the event, Britain waded in to protect its trade route to India through the Suez Canal. From 1882, Egypt was a part of the British Empire. This smoothed the way for British Egyptologists like Petrie”56. The British occupation of Egypt is hereby represented as reasonable (protecting trade routes), unwanted (Egypt had political turmoil + in the end Britain waded in), and good for the development of the science of Egyptology (having smoothed the way for the hero of this story).
Since British rule over Egypt is represented as something positive for the development of the science of archaeology, political independence for Egypt is represented as negative: “In Egypt, the nationalists who had resisted British rule for 40 years finally won a degree of independence. In 1922, Britain granted free elections to an Egyptian parliament. (…) The Egyptians changed the rules of the game by tightly controlling the distribution of their treasures, and this meant that Petrie could no longer fund his work by exporting what he found.” “Ultimately, when the Department of Antiquities in Egypt acquired the capability to enforce their rules, he left Egypt and went to Palestine to dig because he couldn’t get his own way anymore.”(…) “In 1926, Petrie moved his focus to Palestine, now under British rule following the First World War.”57
This again clearly illustrates the symbiotic relationship between colonialism and archaeology. When Egypt regained a degree of political independence, being then able to better protect “their treasures”, Petrie changed his attention to another territory where British rule was less contested. Clearly, the fact that Petrie could still export antiquities en masse from Palestine, but not from Egypt, seems to have played a crucial role in his decision to shift attention: “His work in the 1920’s and 30’s was very productive. He brought a huge collection home to University College London and founded a new institute, housing over 20.000 of his finds.”58 The British antiquity laws which the mandate government of Palestine established in 1928 had facilitated such expropriation of antiquities, stating that: “lands that contain archaeological
54 Zainab BAHRANI; Conjuring Mesopotamia: imaginative geography and a world past; in L. MESKELL (ed.) (1998); p 166 55 E. SAID (1993); Culture and Imperialism; p xiii 56 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015; 09:40-10:11 57 Ibid.; 48:37-50:11 58 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015.; 50:34-50:46
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material can be confiscated by the State and the owners will be compensated as the State sees fit”.59 The fact that the presenter represents such mass transfers of foreign antiquities as something completely normal and positive further proves that archaeology plays a vital part in both legitimising and normalising colonial institutions and relationships.
But who funded Petrie’s work in Palestine and why? The answers to these questions are very revealing. His first excavation in Palestine (1890-1893) had been funded by the Palestine Exploration Fund (est. 1865), who’s original mission statement was: “to promote research into the archaeology and history, manners and customs and culture, topography, geology and natural sciences of biblical Palestine and the Levant.”60 When remaining in Palestine during the last 8 years of his life, Petrie was hosted in Jerusalem by the American School of Oriental Research (est. 1900, now renamed the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research), another research institution originally focussed on Biblical archaeology, where “they found a warm welcome”61. The presenter of this documentary doesn’t seem to notice what to me is an obvious paradox, that this “maverick genius who gave us the tools to unlock the secrets of the past”62, “who established archaeology as a science”63, was mainly interested in Palestine “to find archaeological proof of the Bible.”64 Which neatly brings us to our next subject, that of Biblical archaeology.
3.4 Archaeology and the Bible
“Robinson and Smith had successfully superimposed the map of ancient Palestine upon the present map of some backward provinces of the Ottoman Empire, in consequence discovering Palestine’s hidden treasure: the hundreds of Biblical sites scattered all across the desolate country-side.” Neil Asher Silberman; Digging for God and Country: Exploration, Archaeology and the Secret Struggle for the Holy Land, 1799-1917
It’s not that long ago that the Bible was still widely accepted within Western society as containing absolute and dogmatic truths about the origins and nature of life on earth. This unshaken belief in the factual accuracy of the Bible had lead to the development of a 6000 year history of our planet and the universe. This erroneous, yet dominant view only started to become challenged during the first half of the 19th century, and only gradually became more or less widely accepted amongst Western scholars during the latter half. Empirical evidence, coming from the newly identified
59 G. ZIADEH-SEELY (2007); An Archaeology of Palestine: Mourning a dream; in in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; The University of Chicago Press; p 331 60 http://www.pef.org.uk/history/ 61 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2012); The Man Who Discovered Egypt; Last aired on BBC 4; 6 May 2015; 52:45-52:57 62 Ibid.; 57:17-57:21 63 Ibid.; 57:38-57:41 64 Ibid.; 53:31-53:35
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sciences of geology and archaeology, combined with Darwin’s theory of natural selection, had irrefutably proven the incorrectness of Biblical chronology.65 This development was obviously hard to stomach for those people who felt that their faith in the Bible was coming under attack by such scientific discoveries. This lead eventually towards the defensive tactic of Biblical archaeology, an effort to use the same scientific methods of archaeology to prove the factual accuracy of Biblical accounts.
One of the pioneers of this particular field was the abovementioned Edward Robinson, ‘professor of Old Testament at Andover Theological Seminary in Massachusetts and later at Union Theological Seminary in New York. As one of the staunchest defenders of the literal accuracy of the Bible, he set out in 1837 to explore the Holy Land, together with Eli Smith, a protestant missionary in Beirut, hoping to find evidence supporting the Bible’s historicity. From Cairo they followed the presumed route of the Israelite Exodus through Sinai to Palestine. As they crisscrossed the Palestinian countryside on their way to Beirut, the biblical scholar was able to recognize in the locations and Arabic names of small towns or abandoned mounds the place names mentioned in the Bible. Bir es-Seba was Beersheba, Beitin must be Bethel, el-Jib was Gibeon, and so forth. These identifications became the starting point for all later work in biblical geography and archaeology. However, despite Robinson’s hopes, the first evidence which somewhat substantiated the historical accuracy of a biblical account was not found in Palestine but in Iraq, as a result of French-British colonial rivalry there.’66
‘Having misidentified the ancient tell of Nimrud as part of ancient Nineveh, British excavations during the 1840’s lead to the discovery of a six-and-a-half-foot-tall black marble obelisk with bands of bas-relief depicting conquered kings bringing tribute to an Assyrian monarch. When scholars were able to read the obelisk’s inscriptions they found “Jehu, son of Omri, King of Israel” listed among the tribute-bearing vassals of Shalmaneser III. This brief reference to an Israelite king provided the first definite link between an archaeological discovery and biblical history. This perceived confirmation of the Bible caused a widespread discussion and debate, since it arrived at a time when many felt that scientific discoveries in geology were attacking the foundations of their biblical faith.’67 Obviously, the increasing Western interest in Egyptian and Near Eastern archaeology throughout the 19th century can at least partly be explained by this desire to produce evidence validating biblical narratives, at a time when such narratives became increasingly challenged for their factual inaccuracies.
As it stands, the Bible has a very poor track record when it comes to being a reliable historical source, not in the least because of its multitude of inherently contradictory narratives, most of which defy any rational explanation when taken literally.68 It shouldn’t come as a surprise that relying on the Bible for archaeological
65 Ibid. pp 29-54 66 Ibid. pp 87-89 67 Ibid. p 103 68 As somebody who has reread several books of the Bible, both Old and New Testament, and has researched the historical origins and contexts of this collection of books, I am completely amazed that people can still take these documents seriously as a historical narrative. Contradictions are too many to point out. Just one obvious example is that Saul commits suicide in Samuel I and is killed in Samuel II. Any rational thinking person reading the Bible will stumble upon many such contradictions.
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interpretations has in the past lead to completely erroneous conclusions. For example, it was believed that the excavated city walls of Jericho belonged to the time of Joshua, since the Bible famously relates their destruction in the Book of Joshua. But in the 1950’s, when the site was revisited by archaeologists with the latest dating techniques, it turned out that these walls were actually Early Bronze Age structures, destroyed a thousand years before the Exodus.69 While archaeology was first recruited to deliver evidence for the historical accuracy of biblical narratives, in the long run it only helped to undermine them even further.
But the accuracy or inaccuracy of biblical archaeology is not what concerns us here, it not being the aim of this paper to deliver a verdict on an archaeological sub- discipline. Whatever its conclusions, biblical archaeology was and remains a very potent political weapon, especially within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The fact that it first originated within a colonial context is very important to take into account. ‘Biblical archaeology helped to motivate many Western nations to invest in, interfere with, and expropriate the past with the pretext that the biblical heritage of Palestine belongs to the nations of Christianity rather than to the current inhabitants of that land. With the founding of the Palestine Exploration Fund in 1865, the first scientific base for biblical archaeology had been established. It was then no coincidence that when Western interests in archaeology began to materialise in Palestine, Tell el-Hesi, a site of some biblical significance, was the first to be excavated by Flinders Petrie in 1890-92. Since then the majority of archaeological excavations in Palestine have been focussed on sites believed to have some biblical importance.’70 By only focussing on one distant layer of history, biblical archaeology had become a way to look past the Arab inhabitants of Palestine, turning them irrelevant if not invisible to the Western archaeologists and “explorers” who wished to discover biblical Palestine.
For the Zionist project, biblical archaeology only gradually became a tool for its nation building project. The first waves of Zionist settlers in Palestine had little interest in looking to the past for support of their endeavour. As socialists, building a new type of society which focussed on a brighter future was their goal. Yet in 1914 the Jewish Palestine Exploration Society was founded, modelled after nationalistic European antiquarian societies. 71 ‘By the 1920’s archaeology had begun to play a role in linking these settlers to the land. During those years Jewish nationalists in Palestine sought to label the land and the features of the landscape as a means of legitimating Jewish claims to Palestine.’72 ‘Archaeology was thus recruited to serve the claim that Jews, who left the land nearly 2000 years before, were now returning to their ancient homeland. With its aura of a neutral scientific discipline, archaeology was given the task of providing irrefutable proof of the truth of the Zionist narrative.’73
‘The Zionist movement, and later the state of Israel, had much to gain from autonomous archaeologists who enjoyed high esteem in the world academic
69 William H. STIEBING 1993; p 257 70 G. ZIADEH-SEELY (2007); An Archaeology of Palestine: Mourning a dream; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); Selective remembrances: archaeology in the construction, commemoration, and consecration of national pasts; p 329 71 Ibid.; p 332 72 U. BARAM (2007); Appropriating the past: Heritage, tourism, and archaeology in Israel; in Ibid.; p 304 73 M. FEIGE (2007); Recovering authenticity: West-bank setllers and the 2nd stage of National archaeology; in Ibid.; p 281
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community. In order to play a convincing national role, archaeology had to be presented as scientific, impartial and professional. Having started out as a purely secular project, archaeology was somewhat being used as a substitute for religion by the early Zionist movement. The people’s historical roots in the land, uncovered by a scientific discipline, would replace divine promise as a legitimisation of the Zionist project.’74 I already mentioned that the public interest in archaeology began to wane inside Israel once it had already substantially contributed to the nation building project. So as Feig pointed out, Israeli nationalist archaeology has now entered its 2nd face, taking place not inside the internationally recognised borders of the state of Israel, but inside the territories it has illegally occupied since 1967.75
Although some obvious communalities exist between the first and second phase of Israeli nationalist archaeology, the main one being a focus on biblical archaeology to support a Zionist narrative and subsequent Jewish claims to the land, it are the differences which are very telling. While it was a secular practice inside the state of Israel, a form of national pastime which helped to replace religion, archaeology is now used by Jewish settlers inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories exactly to enhance their religious beliefs. As did the pioneers of biblical archaeology during the 19th century, these settlers adopt a secular scientific practice to combat a process of secularisation, not to integrate with it.
The whole settler project in the Occupied Palestinian Territories stems from the misguided perception of the Bible as a correct historical narrative. As Feige pointed out “The settlers aspire to establish settlements on “the land of the Bible” and at the same time attempt to determine the locations of the biblical settlements themselves. From this point of view, settlement and scholarship are two sides of the same coin, both of them aiming to create a tangible manifestation of the holy text in the daily life of the present.”76 These settlers see themselves as the direct continuation of the original biblical population of Palestine, which has lead to an obsession to build modern Jewish settlements on or near biblical locations.77 These settlements, which reminds one of suburbia USA, have nothing in common with the biblical locations of which they pretend to be the direct continuation, simply by having given it the same name and more or less sharing the same location.
‘Giving ancient names to completely new Jewish settlements is an obvious attempt to define them older as the surrounding Palestinian villages and towns. Thus the practice of archaeology connects and disconnects the settlers from various real and imaginary groups. It creates a double link, one with the patriarchs and kings of the Bible, the other with fellow Jews inside and outside Israel. It is a statement of radical disengagement from the neighbouring Palestinians, whose social landscape is thereby defined as invalid and out of touch with the true nature of the sacred space. An important consequence of this religious obsession to “rebuild” biblical Israel by the construction of modern Jewish settlements is that the “true” map of Israel , which can be “discovered through scientific archaeology”, is not congruent with the current
74 Ibid.; p 290 75 Ibid. pp 277-298 76 Ibid. p 288 77 Ibid. p283
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boundaries of the state of Israel, which, from the settlers’ perspective, are inherently arbitrary and temporary.’78
‘Basically, settler interest for archaeological excavations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories can be seen as an attempt to normalize these spaces within the boundaries of Israel, as part of a supposedly non-problematic and homogeneous whole, through the establishment of an imagined direct connection with a collective Jewish past which is buried beneath the surface. The basic claim being that a mythical unity between Jewish people and Jewish lands can be found and recovered underneath the ground, labels current geopolitical divisions and boundaries as mere “surface deep”, and therefore completely irrelevant.’79 While their motivation to use archaeology is partly religious in nature, needed to correctly determine where to build new Jewish settlements, and what name to give them as to “correctly” connect themselves with the Jewish population of biblical times, it incidentally also helps to represent themselves as “rational men of science” in view of secular people in and outside Israel. To achieve this end, the exploitation of archaeological remains, turning them into commodities for consumption by a global market of mass tourists can be very useful, as I’ll clarify in the following part.
3.5 Archaeology and mass tourism
“For centuries, Armageddon has meant end-times battle of horrific proportions. As the end of this millennium approaches, it also means tourists for Israel.” Kansas City Star, February 22, 199780
The relation between capitalism and archaeology in some way predates the previous three I’ve discussed. After all, what first passed itself as archaeology was practically nothing more than grave robbing, looting and vandalizing ancient sites, in search for profit on the European antiquities market. As Western interest in the history of ancient civilisation grew, so did the demand for artefacts from these civilisations. As Wallerstein and others have pointed out “the historical development of capitalism has involved the thrust towards the commodification of everything.”81 The development of mass tourism during the 2nd half of the 19th century encouraged many to set out to “the Middle East” in order to both visit and consume ‘the Oriënt”. Thomas Cook famously pioneered the practice of packaged tours, turning foreign cultures fit for tourist consumption.82 Upton noted for tourism in general that “Capitalism no longer seeks raw materials and markets for industrial goods alone, but cultural raw materials that can be transformed into hard cash through conservation, restoration, and outright fabrication of indigenous landscapes and traditional cultural practices for the amusement of metropolitan consumers.83
78 Ibid. p 284-286 79 Ibid. p 282 80 As cited in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.) (2007); p 315 81 I. WALLERSTEIN (1995); Historical Capitalism with Capitalist Civilisation; p 16 82 SEZGIN E. & YOLAL M (2012).; Golden age of mass tourism: its history & development; in KASIMOGLU M. (ed).; Visions for Global Tourism Industry 83 D. UPTON (2001); “Authentic” anxieties; in N. ALSAYYAD (ed.); Consuming Tradition, Manufacturing Heritage: Global norms and urban forms in the Age of Tourism; pp 298-305
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Mass tourism essentially encourages countries to make a parody of themselves for the benefit of tourist consumption, which is then represented as “economic development” and “progress”. Turning an archaeological site into a tourist site inherently changes the function of the archaeological remains and their representation towards the public. When biblical archaeology turns into mass tourism, both religion and history become commodities which are shaped to fit the needs and expectations of tourists. Both archaeology and mass tourism thus redefine spaces and bring with them an aura of progress and development. But what was the function of the space before it became converted? Who benefits from such changes and who looses? These are questions that are often out of sight and mind of the general tourist, but will be essential for the analyses of my case study.
Archaeological tourism encourages tourists to look past the contemporary context of the spaces that they visit. As Baram pointed out “The majority of tourists see the remains of the past in the form of foundations and other components of the archaeological record, reconstructions of past landscapes, or artefacts in museums. The images of archaeo-tourism depict a depopulated landscape, an ancient place without the contemporary peoples and their conflicts. The only people are tourists and those people positioned to host the tourism, or to be photographed for tourist consumption.”84 Meaning that in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, archaeological tourism turns the conflict almost invisible and renders it a surface nuisance for tourists, something which can only disrupt the peaceful consumption of foreign history and archaeology. While generally perceived as neutral and beneficial, archaeology combined with tourism clearly plays a political role within societies and in the conflicts between them. How this political potential is played out by different actor-networks will be illustrated with my case-study of “the City of David” in Silwan.
4 Archaeology and Biblical tourism in Occupied East Jerusalem
“I strongly believe that the criticism of Israel’s archaeological practices among politically correct Western scholars is long overdue. (…) Such measures are important not only for the preservation of the cultural heritage of Palestine, but also for restoring Palestinian faith in a world that stands by watching while they are being wiped out of the present and effaced from history.” Ghada Ziadeh-Seely85
“ (…) We should be judged by one standard and allegations made against the state of Israel must be grounded in fact. One allegation that is not grounded in fact is the attempt to describe the Jews as foreign colonialists in their own homeland. This is one of the great lies of modern times. In my office I have a signet ring that was loaned to
84 U. BARAM (2007); Appropriating the past: Heritage, tourism, and archaeology in Israel; in P. KOHL, M. KOZELSKY and N. BEN-YEHUDA (ed.); p 319 85 G. ZIADEH-SEELY (2007); An Archaeology of Palestine: Mourning a dream; in Ibid.; p 344
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me by Israel’s Department of Antiquities. This ring was found right next to the Western Wall but it dates back 2.800 years, 200 years after king David declared Jerusalem as our people’s capital. Now this ring is the seal of a Jewish official, and his name is inscribed on it, in Hebrew, the name is Netanyahu. (…)” Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, AIPAC congress 201086
Following the lead of Rodinson, it is my understanding that the only way to understand the true nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is through the perspective of settler colonialism.87 While Mr. Netanyahu claims that this is “an allegation not grounded in fact”, I shall prove it to be true by thoroughly analysing the facts on the ground. As clearly established in the previous chapter, direct connections between contemporary human beings and ancient/pre-historic cultures are purely modern constructs. The quote above is yet another perfect illustration of this process. In his speech, Netanyahu constructs a direct link between himself and a “Jewish official” from 2800 years ago, attempting to represent himself as a physical manifestation of “Jewish continuity in the land of Israel”. His argument might come across as very convincing, if one ignores the fact that his father received the name Benzion Mileikowsky at birth, and only changed his surname to Netanyahu after emigrating to Palestine.88 Explicit connections between a particular space and a certain historical time period simply does not exist by itself, it has to be actively reproduced. “The City of David” in Silwan is a perfect example of how such a connection is actively constructed and supported.
4.1 A biblical Disneyland
Having first arrived in Jerusalem as a simple tourist, I initially did not see the current conflict, at least not as clearly as I do now. I had known the name Jerusalem ever since I was a little child. As part of a Catholic upbringing, it was introduced to me as the city of the Bible, the city of Jezus, king Solomon and king David. But what had fascinated me the most about this city was the history of the First Crusade. A barbarian invasion with the goal of reclaiming “the Holy Land” for Christianity. Thousands had left their home, answering to the calls: “To Jerusalem!” and “God wills it!”; not having a clue where exactly that place was, but certain that they would go to heaven if they died along the way, the latter most of them did. I always wondered, how could a city be so cursed by its perceived holiness? As I reached the end of my stay in “the Holy Land”, I got a little closer to finding an answer to that question.
To explore Jerusalem, I had picked up a map from the hostel in which I was staying. Located inside the “Old City”, the New Swedish Hostel is run by Palestinians, and I shared a dorm with a mix of Asian tourists and American Evangelicals, the latter trying several times to convince me that accepting Jesus Christ as my true Lord and
86 Speech at AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee), AIPAC congress, Washington DC, 2010 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edBiFIPAKnU Extract appears between 16:33 and 17:47; Last seen on 31/05/2015 87 RODINSON M. (1973); Israel: A colonial-settler state?; 88 http://www.britannica.com/biography/Benzion-Netanyahu ; Consulted on 17/08/2015
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Saviour was the only way to escape the eternal fires of hell. The tourist map of Jerusalem, which was provided free of charge in this hostel, actually has two Jerusalems. On one side is a map stretching from Mount Herzl in the west until the Mount of Olives in the east, the Green Line non-existent. In the bottom right corner of the map, just bellow the walls of the “Old City”, written in large letters it says IR DAVID. Just below that is an icon signifying a site of tourist importance, identified as HASHILO’AH POOL, a bit further below, almost completely in the bottom right corner, the space is identified as SILWAN (KFAR HASHILO’AH). This seems to imply that Ir David (the City of David) is not the same location as Silwan, yet both names refer to the same space.
This fictional separation between Silwan and “the City of David” is repeated on the other side, which shows a seemingly detailed pictorial map of the “Old City”. The Mountain of Olives is pictured on top, above it is written a biblical poem attributed to king David.89 Jaffa Gate is at the bottom, underneath which are written three verses from the Bible that refer directly to Jerusalem.90 In the right top corner, just across the street from the city walls, we see in big letters CITY OF DAVID, accompanied by two more verses from the Bible91, on the other side of the valley we see in much smaller lettering SILEAN (KFAR HASHILOAJ) (Sic), which reflects the much smaller importance given to the name. It’s important to keep in mind, that although these two names clearly reflect a different identity, they do refer to the exact same physical space.
According to the map, the most logical route to “the City of David” is by leaving the “Old City” through the Dung Gate. On my way to the tourist site, I pass the ongoing excavation at Givati Parking lot to my right. Metal plates prevent one from viewing the archaeological site, publicity for “the City of David” is pictured upon them. As one approaches the site, a sign declares “City of David”, a bit further on, past the entrance of the tourist site where the pavement gradually starts deteriorating, there is a sign that says Silwan. This enforces the wrong impression that the two names identify separate geographical spaces.
89 Psalms 122 90 Isaiah 66:10; Psalms 27:4; First Book of Kings 2:15 91 “So David dwelt in the stronghold and called it the city of David. And David built round about from the Millo and inward.” ; “And brought her into the city of David, until he had made an end of building his own house, and the house of the Lord, and the wall of Jerusalem round about”
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The entrance to the tourist site, pictured above looking from inside out, is designed to give the tourist an impression of entering a new landscape, a different space. This space is constantly being linked to king David, starting with the big harp at the entrance which is accompanied by harp music coming out of hidden speakers. This instrument is intended to symbolise king David, “the psalmist”, and Elad, the organisation which runs this tourist compound, has chosen it as their symbol. Its presence is practically everywhere, the personnel working at the site carry this symbol on their chest, while the symbol of the National Parks Authority decorates their shoulder. The security personnel at the gate however does not wear these symbols, they have a different uniform and work for a private company called Modiin Ezrachi93.
Another feature at the entrance is, beneath the logo of the National Parks Authority and the official name “City of David, Jerusalem Walls National Park”, are enscribed the names of two private donors, “E. and Z. Shridler for the glory of Jerusalem”. The benches and greenery inside the entrance offer a perfect space for large groups of tourists to gather before continuing to the archaeological remains themselves. As I’m standing there taking notes of my surroundings, a large group of tourists passes me by. “Wow, how pretty” I hear a voice with a thick American accent exclaiming. Most of them carry camera’s, some take pictures of every corner and every sign before walking past, others are filming their whole entrance into the tourist site. I followed this group as they made their way down the small stairs, passing a person who’s dressed in “biblical attire” for children’s’ amusement, towards the space where the ticket sales, toilets, souvenir- and coffee shop are located, the archaeological remains being underneath, accessible through a metal stairway.
92 http://www.cityofdavid.org.il/en/gallery/images 93 Al Jazeera; Israel 'gun guards' terrorise East Jerusalem; Consulted on 19/04/15 http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/11/israel-gun-guards-terrorise-east-jerusalem- 2014112661245358505.html
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In this space most benches have covering to keep the tourist in the shade or out of the rain while waiting. This is the location where tourists gather before their guided tour begins, some groups have their own guide, others opt for the guides provided by Elad. It’s in this location that I approached one of the tourists from the big group. I asked Ben Krestoff from Clearwater Florida about his group and motivations for coming here. He said that it was a non denominational Evangelical church that had organised this trip, doing this whenever there was enough demand for it. Most members of the group are members of the same church. His reasons for wanting to come here were “To study God’s word”, “To visit the places where Jezus walked”, “To get closer to scripture”.94 He did not have much time for me, their private guide was about to start the tour.
While a small group of mixed individual tourists waits for a guided tour by Elad, I see several Palestinian children returning home in their school uniforms. Another large group of tourists arrives, again their accents betray a US origin. Most look quite old, I hear 17 people won’t be able to go inside Hezekiah’s tunnel. I started a conversation with the youngest member of the group who turned out to be the daughter of one of the organisers of the trip. Meredith Pierce then told me that they are on a 12 day trip organised by Baptist Today, a Christian magazine. Their group consists of 48 people, all from different states but of course al readers of the same magazine, the majority look much older than 40. While originally 57 people had booked a spot, 9 people had cancelled out of worries for security, Israel’s operation Protective Edge being not that long ago. Meanwhile, she had heard from people who’d cancelled that they’d regretted their decision, seeing how well things were going. She also confessed to have “Never seen something this old before”.95
I was then introduced to her father, John Pierce, who works for Baptist Today. After having explained that I was interviewing his daughter as part of my research, he then in turn introduced me to Tony Carthy, writer for the magazine and PhD in Hebrew scripture, another co-organiser of the trip. For him archaeology is very important for a better understanding of Scripture, to get into contact with their original context. They’re using a private Israeli tourism company to take them around the country, also to Bethlehem. He’s very happy about the trip so far, it’s the first time that the magazine has organised a trip like this, and he hopes there will be many more to come.96 Undoubtedly, the article he will write for his magazine will create more enthusiasts for visiting the “Holy Land”. I have to stop my interview as their private guide is about to start his explanation. He mentions that the Israeli archaeologist Mazar has identified this space as the location of the palace of king David, and that although other archaeologists have their doubts about this, it would make sense if it were so.
As their group is split in two, I stay behind with the people who’re not able to enter Hezekiah’s tunnel. I start a conversation with Susan Graham, who at age 65 says she feels like one of the youngest in the group. She tells me that for her it’s partially a faith trip. Again the same argument that “You can’t understand scripture without seeing the context”. She says that she loves the beauty of it all “So many rocks”, and is fascinated by the rate of excavation. Having toured around the country from one
94 Interview with Ben Krestoff on 13/11/2014 95 Interview with Meredith Pierce on 13/11/2014 96 Interview with Tony Carthy on 13/11/2014
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site to another, she was impressed with how much had already been accomplished in such a short time. As I leave her to rejoin her group, I see more Palestinian kids hanging around the area and later a small group of little Jewish children, obviously on their way home.
The mixed group which had been waiting for a guided tour by Elad had by now left this space. Having previously been on one of those tours, I could imagine the story that was being presented to them.97 After having collected everybody in front of the ticket sales area, our guide took us towards a small cinema complex. Before we entered, a small introduction about the site was deemed necessary. First of all we were told that the City of David is the natural extension of the Temple Mount. We were then asked by our guide, who carried amongst his material a Hebrew Bible, in what book of the Bible is Jerusalem first mentioned? After a short guessing game, our guide tells us it’s first mentioned in the Book of Joshua, described as a Jebusite enclave surrounded by Jewish cities. According to the Bible, a phrase we will hear our guide use almost every other sentence, David left Hebron after 7 years to conquer Jerusalem, but the Bible doesn’t mention why, which our guide finds very interesting to point out. Our group, consisting of both Christians and Jews, seems generally taken in by our guide’s story. Clearly both Christian and Jewish tourists are feeling connected to this place through the use of the Bible.
We are then taken to a 3D movie of 15 minutes. An elderly looking man on the screen, wearing an Indiana Jones hat and carrying a Bible in hand, tells us that “every stone has a story, all you need is a shovel and Bible to uncover that story”. A dramatic opening then tells us that this is the story of the City of David “where it all began”. First we get to see how king David conquered Jerusalem from the Jebusites, sending his men up an underground waterway. Then we see that his son king Solomon builds the First Temple, God being physically represented by a fiery tornado emanating from the building. We then see the story of king Hezekiah, how he built up Jerusalem’s defences to defend against an Assyrian attack that, thanks to the Lord, never came. We then see the destruction of the first temple by the Babylonians. The story, constantly carried by biblical quotes, then skips a couple of centuries, we see a 2nd temple built, and eventually destroyed by the Romans under emperor Nero. Then the voice of the presenter says that Jerusalem changed hands continuously for 2000 years until today, because “The Jewish people never forget its eternal capital”. The credits reveal Jewish residents of New York as its main financial contributors.
We were then taken to the top of “the citadel”, a newly constructed tower to give the tourists a nice view of the surrounding area. A commemorative plaque indicates who funded this structure, again it were Jewish citizens of America “In honor of the glory of kingship that fills the City of David”. “How was the movie?” our guide asks us. “Good” is the communal answer. Our guide then tells us that four walls, not one, survived the destruction of the 2nd temple, and talks about how the view was 2000 years ago, telling us that Jerusalem never expanded east “because that’s desert country”. Since our guide starts practically every sentence with “the Bible tells us”, it is obvious that he has no question about the Bible’s historical accuracy.
97 The following is based on a guided tour by Elad, English version on 4/05/2014
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We were then taken back down, down the metal stairway towards the archaeological remains. These stones look anything but impressive, but here came the story of our guide to the rescue. “Do you see remnants of a palace?” he asked us rhetorically. “Not really.” He continued “Let’s ignore the archaeology for a moment. Here is the symbol which is used on government buildings of the Jewish state today” showing us a picture of a menorah, the contemporary Israeli government symbol. “We also found the symbol of an ancient Jewish public building here”. What he doesn’t mention however is that this symbol was dated to the 9th century B.C., at the very least 100 years after king David supposedly lived, and that nowhere in “the City of David” was there found any evidence of Jewish kingship, let alone of any individual king.98 But clearly it’s the guide’s goal to convince us that this is the exact location of king David’s palace. He shows us an artists interpretation of king David looking out over the view. “In this psalm he says that Jerusalem is surrounded by mountains, we are now looking at the view that king David had while writing this psalm. The topography we see here is the topography described in the Bible”. A contentious conclusion of his to say the least.
Most members of our group clearly saw no problem that our guide was using the Bible as the only historical source of reference. When our guide asked us later on “What is more important? Two seals with 2 names or one seal with 80 names?” A tourist answered with an American accent “Depends if the names are mentioned in the Bible or not, because they prove that what happened in the Bible really happened”. When on our way to Hezekiah’s tunnel, I noticed an elderly couple from our group, carefully studying an artist interpretation of “the City of David”, discussing the picture as if they were looking at the actual city described in the Bible. Needless to say that the rest of our tour continued in a similar vain. Practically every question to our guide was answered with “It says in the Bible that…”. Passing more plaques commemorating Jewish donors from the USA, we went by Warren’s shaft, along the projection of a tower upon archaeological remains, guards in biblical dress posted next to it. The whole idea is to make the bible come alive in the eyes of the visitors. Most of which that day were, as a matter of fact, Israeli schoolchildren. Our guide got so annoyed by their constant noise that he often stopped to let these classes go through, but to no avail, for whenever a class of yelling schoolchildren passed us by, a new group arose to take their place.
By the end of the tour, exiting Hezekiah’s tunnel at the Shiloah Pool, our guide leaves us with the story of the Hebrew inscription that was found inside the tunnel we’ve just visited. Mocking superstitious Arabs for initially being scared to enter the tunnel, he tells us it was discovered by accident by a young boy. While he ignores the fact that the inscription doesn’t mention any king, and therefore that it might not be “Hezekiah’s tunnel” after all, he does let us know his outrage that this inscription is still somewhere in a museum in Istanbul. While he presents it as a disgrace that Turkey refuses to return this inscription to Israel, discovered when this territory still
98 Interview with Ronny Reich on 13/05/2014; He believes king David is a historical figure, but thinks his royal pedigree was a later invention. He might have been a leader of a band of bandits whose stories got engrossed into myths, like the King Arthur or Robin Hood ballads of the British Isles. In my view however, all evidence pointing towards the historicity of king David are very indirect, the most important one being an inscription where a king calls himself “from the house of David”. That aside, if he existed or not should not be the issue of this paper. Whatever the answer maybe, it should not be used to negatively impact the lives of people who are living in the present day
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belonged to the Ottoman empire, Israel simply has no right whatsoever to make such a demand, since we were now located on what is still internationally recognised as Occupied Palestinian Territory. But by now we had reached the end of our tour and we were recommended to pay for a minibus, of course operated by Elad, to take us back to the tourist centre. This way, tourists can walk underneath Palestinian houses, alongside biblical archaeology, and by the end be taken straight back to Elad’s souvenir shop, totally oblivious of the contemporary reality in Silwan, the place they have just visited.
4.2 The other side of the tourist site
Determined to find out more about this tourist site than meets the eye, I returned for more in depth observations and interviews. Close to the ticket sales is a tourist map of Jerusalem. It tells me that the street nearby is named “Ma’a lot IR David Street”, not the Palestinian name which is Wadih Hilweh. This information is confirmed by my tourist map, which also only uses the Israeli name accompanied by the English translation. A young girl, wearing the harp on her chest, asked some tourists passing by if they were having fun. “Yes, it’s great.” Was the answer. I decided to ask her a couple of questions.99 Her name was Schir Gros, 18 years old, she was working as a guide for Elad as part of her national service called Sherut Leumi. This is an alternative for serving in the Israeli army, mostly granted to women for religious reasons, meaning she was a very religious person.
It had taken her and the others three weeks to become a guide here. Classes had been given by 15-20 professors to teach them “the whole history of Jerusalem, with an emphasis on the City of David”. She enjoys working here because “It’s amazing, you can imagine king David walking here”. The City of David feels like a big family to her and she feels more connected to the place than before. Today is obviously a calm one, she tells me that a guide has between three and none groups per day to attend. I asked her if Israeli soldiers come to visit this place, she confirms this saying that the soldiers come here to connect to the past. When I ask about the visits made by schoolchildren, she tells me that it’s for all ages between 10-18. She says that it’s up to the schools themselves to decide at what grade to organise a trip to the City of David, but you’re practically guaranteed to visit this place with your class at some point. Living in a house further inside the village of Silwan, together with 5 other guides from Elad, I asked her about their relation with the Palestinians. She says that the Palestinians fight amongst themselves but it doesn’t effect them much. “Even Arabs work here”. When I asked this question again later on in the conversation, she said that there are “not so much problems with the Arabs. Sometimes they throw stones, you can feel the tension”. But what was causing all this tension? What was making the Palestinians in Silwan fighting amongst themselves? Clearly I wouldn’t find an answer to these questions by hanging around the tourist centre.
I decided to follow the infrastructure as if I was tourist. Passing the unimpressive collection of archaeological remains, it seemed very obvious to me that without the signs which linked these stones to the Bible, not much tourists would be interested to see them. But every sign being accompanied by a verse from the Bible, and the site
99 Interview with Schir Gros 13/11/2014
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itself being named “the City of David”, a connection with the Bible is actively established. One sign saying “King David’s palace?”, explaining that this is Mazar’s interpretation and that “other archaeologists dispute this”. Hereby superficially claiming to be objective, yet only the interpretation that supports a biblical narrative is presented, the others are silenced by lumping them together in an unspecified objection to the biblical interpretation.
Following the nice new pavement which leads me away from “king David’s palace?”, I encounter some nice looking houses, carrying Israeli flags and Elad’s symbol of the harp. To any unsuspecting tourist, these houses look like they perfectly fit the surrounding environment, one would hardly suspect that by living here, these Israeli’s were actually breaking International Humanitarian Law. Yet some minor details prove that something is not right here. Camera’s are practically everywhere on these houses, making sure any angle can be constantly filmed. Metal bars and chickenwire prevent rocks from breaking the windows behind. This clean street finally leads to the Shiloah pool. A gate prevents tourists from entering the pool from this side without paying Elad for admission. I notice that the person at this gate is talking with a friend in Arabic. Schir didn’t lie, some Arabs do work for Elad.
Coming to a fork in the road, the infrastructure and my tourist map recommended me both not to follow the road that lead further into the village of Silwan, but instead to turn left, towards the Kidron Valley and “Absalom’s tomb”. As I was about too leave Silwan, a young Palestinian boy ran towards me, he said he could show me some interesting things. He took me to a big window, on the inside I could see the entrance to Hezekiah’s tunnel, which I’d already visited on Elad’s guided tour. He then offered to take me to Shiloah pool, which I declined saying that I’d just come from there. The boy then insisted that I should follow him to his home for coffee or tea, which I accepted. Once inside, I was introduced to some of his brothers and his mother. They then tried to sell me souvenirs, mostly necklaces with Christian symbols, one of which even combining the Christian fish with the Star of David. Upon seeing this particular item, I thought to myself that this family was most likely not very politically active. Trying to make do with the situation as it stood, aiming to lure and please wandering tourists as a means of economic survival. I asked if there were any problems between Palestinians and Elad, they said there were none. Knowing that this simply wasn’t true, I touched the point again later on, which clearly made them feel uncomfortable. The boy then offered to take me to the Wadih Hilweh centre, over there I would be certain to find Palestinians prepared to talk to me about this issue. I thanked them for their time, paid for the coffee, and left.
The Wadih Hilweh centre is located in Wadih Hilweh street, which my map identifies as Ma’a lot IR David Street. Named after a Palestinian woman killed in 1936, Wadih Hilweh is also the name of the neighbourhood in Silwan where the tourist site is located. The Wadih Hilweh centre is a grassroots project founded in 2007 by local residents. Organising activities for the children of the neighbourhood100, it also functions as an information centre and seems to be a focal point of local resistance. They have their own website, www.silwanic.net, where they disseminate news concerning the Israeli occupation in East Jerusalem in general and Silwan in particular. It is a chronicle of clashes, killings and arrests.
100 Interview with Ahmed Qaraeen on 21/04/2014
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I interviewed three Palestinian residents of Silwan on completely separate occasions, yet their discourses were quite similar.101 Ahmed and Nihad both told me that there had been Yemenite Jews living in Silwan for decades without causing any conflict. All problems started in 1991, the year the settlers from Elad turned up. Referring to them as “a state within a state” is a recurring theme. Private security guards, dubbed “gun guards” by these Palestinians, function as the settlers’ private police and army. The company they work for is called Modiin Ezrachi, and they have been contracted by the Israeli Ministry of Housing and Construction.
‘In 1991, Modiin Ezrachi security personnel came to Silwan alongside the first settlers from the Elad Foundation, and their number continues to grow, with a recent increase accompanying the takeover of 25 apartments by Elad in September 2014.’102 These private guards have a clear presence around the tourist compound. At the main entrance for tourists there is a security booth in which there is always at least one guard every day of the week, including Sabbath. Since the average international tourist experiences this space as an open-air museum, the presence of such a private guard does not raise any questions. While it appears that they are guarding an archaeological site, they are actually there to guard the settlers in Silwan.
In November 2014, the newspaper Haaretz reported that the Knesset Finance Committee had approved an additional ca. 4.7 million euros to fund security for Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem, which remain illegal under International Law, bringing the total spent in 2014 to more than 24 million euros. 103 ‘Funding for the security of Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem has risen continuously over the years, from ca. 1,6 million euros in 1991 to double that in 1995. The figure had risen to ca. 12 million euros by 2010. Speaking during the abovementioned finance committee meeting, Housing Ministry director general Shlomo Ben-Eliyahu said the addition to the budget would not be permanent, because the installation of additional cameras would enable funding to be reduced next year to ca. 15.5 million euros. However, according to calculations from the Finance Ministry, the cost of protecting each individual Israeli settler in occupied East Jerusalem is estimated to be approximately 7.000 euros a year.’104
The fact that the settlers from the Elad Foundation are first protected by a private security company, and not by the IDF or Israeli police, raises some interesting questions. First of all, how does the state of Israel benefit from this arrangement? Why not offer security through the official channels of the Jerusalem Municipality and local police? One obvious result of this practice is that security services are by definition and contract only offered to the Israeli settlers in Silwan, and not to its Palestinian residents. It seems reasonable to conclude that this is the intended goal of this particular arrangement between the Israeli state and Modiin Ezrachi. By hiring a
101 Ibid.; Interview with Daoud al Ghoul 20/09/2014; Nihad Siam (brother of Jawwad Siam) 09/11/2014 102 Al Jazeera; Israel 'gun guards' terrorise East Jerusalem; Consulted on 19/04/15 on http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2014/11/israel-gun-guards-terrorise-east-jerusalem- 2014112661245358505.html 103 N. HASSON (2014) Israel spends annual $8k per settler in East Jerusalem security costs; http://www.haaretz.com/news/national/.premium-1.627926; Consulted on 16/042015 104 Interview with Ahmed Qaraeen 21/04/14; Interview with Nihad Siam 09/11/14
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private security company, the Israeli state does not only abdicate its responsibilities for delivering security to all residents of Silwan, but also avoids any direct liability for the possible human rights abuses performed by these guards. On their website, the volunteers of Wadi Hilweh Information Center have reported extensively about the activities of these “gun guards”, whom they also accuse of randomly assaulting, and even killing, Palestinian residents of Silwan.105 This practice by the state of Israel, of delegating responsibilities and liabilities towards private organisations (such as Elad) and companies (such as Modiin Ezrachi) is not limited to Silwan, and have lead at least one academic to accuse the state of Israel of basically outsourcing human rights violations.106
While the Palestinian residents of Silwan pay their taxes to Israeli authorities, they are being treated as less then 2nd class citizens. ‘They are considered residents of Jerusalem, not Israeli citizens. They hold blue identity cards which, according to the residency law, entitle them to more civil rights than the Palestinian residents of the West Bank. Around 44.000 – 55.000 Palestinians live in the village of Silwan, most are Muslim, while the amount of Israeli settlers is estimated between 400-500.’107 Next to having to live with constant harassment from settlers and security forces, they are also under threat of having their children arrested or their houses confiscated and/or demolished. According to Ahmed, 56% of Palestinian houses in Silwan have a demolition order, of which 88 houses are located in the al-Bustan neighbourhood. Nihad told me that his brothers’ house has a demolition order, while his own house has suffered damage from the underground archaeological excavations.
A regular visitor to the Wadih Hilweh Information Centre is Yonathan Mizrachi, co- founder of the Israeli NGO Emek Shaveh (Hebrew for “Common Ground”, who always ends his alternative tour of “the City of David” in this spot. While his tour used to be complimented by a local Palestinian volunteer from the Information Centre, this cooperation seems to have been suspended indefinitely since operation Protective Edge of summer 2014.108 While not openly hostile, Nihad and Daoud told me that they don’t agree with Emek Shaveh and everything Yonathan tells to his tourists. Daoud went as far to say that “Emek Shaveh does not fight against the occupation. Do they consider “the City of David” as occupied territory? They are only interested in archaeology. They want to be in charge of these remains instead of Elad.”109
4.3 A tale of two cities
Israeli society is divided in more than one way, not in the least politically. The well known division between an Israeli political Left and Right is best exemplified by two of its most famous cities, progressive secular Tel Aviv and traditional religious Jerusalem. The political battle between these two completely different Israeli societies
105 Ibid. 106 N. GORDON (2002); Outsourcing violations: the Israeli case in Journal of Human Rights, VOL. 1, NO. 3 (September 2002), 321–337 107 Y. MIZRACHI (2010); Archaeology in the Shadow of the Conflict: the Mound of Ancient Jerusalem (City of David) in Silwan; p 46 108 Interview with Yonathan Mizrachi 13/11/2014 109 Interview with Daoud al Ghoul 20/09/2014
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does however not limit itself to the ballot box, it is also fought on the ground, as the case of “the City of David” illustrates.
Working together for the Israel Antiquities Authority, supervising salvage excavations in East Jerusalem as part of the construction of the separation wall, Yonathan Mizrachi and Gideon Suleimani decided they disagreed with the way archaeology was being abused to further the occupation and quit their jobs. They turned their attention to Silwan feeling they had a good case, from a purely archaeological perspective, to counter the current situation where archaeological remains are being exploited by a rightwing Israeli NGO (Elad). Starting with their alternative tours to the tourist site in 2008, they were soon accused of slander by Elad. In the end they lost their court case and each individual was fined 5.000 shekels. I asked Yonathan if this hadn’t been a big setback for them, to which he replied that they had actually been relieved by the verdict, since Elad had initially demanded millions.110 Thus, the NGO Emek Shaveh was born in 2009, partly out of a need to prevent such court cases in the future, and transfer judicial liability from the individuals themselves to the newborn organisation.
During the first years of their existence, settlers would try to disrupt their tours by shouting and intimidation, this doesn’t happen anymore. Since then they have also expanded their tours to other areas. Their tour of Jerusalem's green belt, for instance, highlights the broader issue of how designating certain spaces in East Jerusalem as a National Park is used as a political weapon.111 A perfect example of this is the National Park Emek Tzurim. This space was once a natural area for residential expansion for the Palestinian residents of Silwan, construction was then prohibited by declaring it an Israeli National Park. The official legitimisation being “to preserve a Biblical view”. Yet the site lacked anything of interest in order to attract tourists, until Elad started to use this space for its “Temple Mount Antiquities Salvage Operation”.
Emek Shaveh however doesn’t limit itself to giving alternative tours, their archaeologists have written extensively about “the City of David” in Silwan.112 In one of their most recent publications, for instance, they detail how ‘the Israeli Antiquities Authority shifted from categorical opposition to construction in 1998, through conditional accommodation in 2002, to enthusiastic partnership in planning a vast tourist hub in 2009.’113 While they have also turned their attention towards Israeli archaeology in the West Bank114, “the City of David” remains their core issue, and
110 Interview with Yonathan Mizrachi 13/11/2014 111 Emek Shaveh's tour of Jerusalem's green belt by Yonathan Mizrachi 14/10/2014 112R. GREENBERG & A. KEINAN (2007); The present past of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Israeli Archaeology in the West Bank and East Jerusalem R. GREENBERG. (2009). Towards an Inclusive Archaeology in Jerusalem: The Case of Silwan/The City of David. Public Archaeology, Issue 8 (1), pp. 35-50 Y. MIZRACHI (2010); Archaeology in the Shadow of the Conflict: the Mound of Ancient Jerusalem (City of David) in Silwan R. GREENBERG & Y. MIZRACHI (2011); From Shiloah to Silwan: Visitor’s guide to ancient Jerusalem (City of David) and the village of Silwan; Y. MIZRACHI (2012); From Silwan to the Temple Mount; Y. MIZRACHI (2014); In Silwan, the settlers are winning - big time; article on http://972mag.com/in- silwan-the-settlers-are-winning-big-time/97214/; Last seen 01/10/2014 113 R. GREENBERG (2014); A Privatised Heritage: How the Israel Antiquities Authority Relinquished Jerusalem’s Past; Emek Shaveh; Jerusalem 114 http://alt-arch.org/en/west-bank/; Consulted on 18/06/2015
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over here their advocacy doesn’t limit itself to research and publishing, they’re also prepared to take Elad to court.
Together with other leftwing Israeli NGO’s, such as Bimkom and Ir Amim, Emek Shaveh has filed a complaint against the proposed construction of new tourist infrastructure on top of the archaeological remains of “Givati parking lot”. This Kedem Compound has been described as having the ambition of becoming a “biblical shrine” whatever that may be. 115 According to an official statement by Emek Shaveh “There is no doubt that the massive structure planned by Elad and the Nature and Parks Authority is contrary to all accepted standards of preservation of a central archeological site and its public presentation, and that its construction will damage the ancient remnants that the excavation has uncovered.(…) The construction of such a dominant compound atop antiquities and very close to the walls of the Old City and the Temple Mount, at the entrance to the village of Silwan, poses political, ethical and planning problems: political, because the compound is intended to serve settlers and their partisan ideologies, ethical because it is being imposed on the present-day inhabitants and detracts from their quality of life, and planning because it buries antiquities beneath it and introduces many foreign elements to the heart of the historical basin. These include vehicular traffic and tunnels, which distort the character of the landscape and its context.”116
Emek Shaveh is clearly not the only leftwing Israeli NGO concerning itself with “the City of David”. Ir Amim117, Bimkom118, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolition119, Rabbis for Human Rights120, all oppose the current situation in Silwan and offer tourists an alternative view of the tourist site. All of them seem to agree that Judaizing East Jerusalem is the current goal, and that this is Elad’s primary raison d’être. This illustrates the fact that “the political battle between secular Tel Aviv and religious Jerusalem” is also being actively waged on the ground. The fact that the religious settlers of Elad receive government support, while the leftwing NGO’s can merely try to object against this ongoing situation, clearly reflects an uneven power relation between the two camps. As for the Palestinian NGO’s and individuals in all of this, their situation seems to be best illustrated by the case of Daoud al Ghoul.
Daoud is a native of Silwan, the director of youth programs for the Health Work Committees in Jerusalem and the Kanaan Network of Palestinian civil society organizations and a prominent community organizer.121 I had participated on two of his alternative tours of Jerusalem and got to know him as a very intelligent and calm human being, even when faced with violent provocations. He had recently returned from giving a speech to the European Parliament in Brussels, about the increasing Israeli restrictions and infringements on the work of Palestinian health workers and organizations in Jerusalem, when suddenly all the trouble started. “On Sunday 30
115 Interview with Gideon Suleimani on 1/05/2014 116 http://alt-arch.org/en/the-government-has-decided-to-build-the-kedem-compound-in-silwan/; Consulted on 18/06.2015 117 http://www.truah.org/issuescampaigns/supportpeace/insideneighborhoods/silwan/13- issuescampaigns/supportpeace/256-alternative-tours.html; Consulted on 23/04/15 118 http://bimkom.org/eng/our-mission/; Consulted on 23/04/15 119 Interview with Jeff Halper 21/04/2014 120 http://rhr.org.il/eng/about/; Consulted on 23/04/15 121 http://samidoun.net/2015/06/take-action-free-human-rights-defender-daoud-al-ghoul-stop-the- attacks-on-jerusalem/; Consulted on 17/08/2015
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November 2014, 31-year-old Daoud al-Ghoul was called to the police station in the Old City of Jerusalem. The reason, he was to discover, was to receive an order expelling him from the city for six months. On the basis of a secret file that said he was a danger to public security, he was told. Daoud was suddenly illegally present in the city he’d called home for his whole life. A few days later, al-Ghoul was banished from the West Bank on the basis of similarly opaque evidence.”122 After then first being banned from travelling abroad until October 2015, Israeli authorities eventually arrested Daoud on 25 June 2015.123
According to Daoud, his arrest is not about him personally: “It’s not the first time. Several cultural activities have been attacked, and they have been attacking activists for a long time. It’s all tied to the attempt to try to say Jerusalem is part of a Jewish state, and a Jewish city. It’s trying to not allow anything out of this frame. You can say it’s ethnic cleansing, say whatever you want to call it, but it’s having a big effect on people. It’s about creating a new reality. They want out of any talks, discussions, the peace process. They are creating a new reality that can’t be changed. And it’s about not having anyone refusing or resisting the Israeli control of the city.”124
4.4 Digging deep
Before concluding this case study with an interview of an official spokesperson of the Elad Foundation, let’s take a step backwards and look again at the broader context. Following the illegal annexation by the state of Israel in 1967, large areas of Silwan became designated as a National Park in 1974125, thus transferring the authority (but not the ownership) over these lands to the Nature and Parks Authority, a governmental agency which is under the supervision of the Israeli Ministry of Environment. This situation imposed severe limitations on the Palestinian residents of Silwan who suddenly found themselves living inside an Israeli National Park, making it practically impossible to expand residential areas to match their increasing demographic needs. In the 1980’s, the Nature and Parks Authority transferred some of its responsibilities for the management of the national park in Silwan to the Jerusalem Municipality.126 Although this new context made life progressively unbearable for Palestinians living in Silwan, it wasn’t sufficient to seriously impact the demographic reality on the ground, which explains why the Elad Foundation eventually became involved.
Founded in 1986, the Elad Foundation’s official mission statement is to “strengthen the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and this in the means of tours, guidance,
122 B. STATTON (2014); Illegal at Home: the story of Daoud al-Ghoul; http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/illegal-home-story-daoud-al-ghoul-623879270; Consulted on 17/08/2015 123 http://samidoun.net/2015/06/take-action-free-human-rights-defender-daoud-al-ghoul-stop-the- attacks-on-jerusalem/; Consulted on 17/08/2015 124 B. STATTON (2014); Illegal at Home: the story of Daoud al-Ghoul; http://www.middleeasteye.net/news/illegal-home-story-daoud-al-ghoul-623879270; Consulted on 17/08/2015 125 http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/national_parks_jerusalem_walls 126 Yonathan Mizrachi; Archaeology in the Shadow of the Conflict: the Mound of Ancient Jerusalem (City of David) in Silwan; 2010; p 44
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populating (emphasis added), and publishing material.”127 In other words, to enhance the Judaization of Occupied East Jerusalem. Since 1991, Elad has been directly involved in Silwan, transferring Palestinian residential buildings to Jewish Israeli settlers. Their security is guaranteed by a private company (Modiin Ezrachi), the cost of which is paid in full by the Israeli Housing Ministry. Despite these efforts, Elad has not been able to significantly alter the demographic reality in Silwan in their favour. Most recent estimates put the number of Israeli settlers between 400-500, while it is estimated that there are still about 45.000-50.000 Palestinian residents in Silwan.128 This explains why the Elad Foundation eventually, from 2003 onwards, also got involved with the exploitation of the archaeological remains that are located in Silwan. An agreement that is to be renewed every three years was signed between the National Parks Authority and Elad, the first being responsible for general management, the latter for operating on the ground.129
I’m back at the entrance of the tourist site for a meeting with Ze’ev Orenstein, director of International Affairs for Elad. Once serving as the Israel Programming Coordinator for Yavneh Olami, a Religious Zionist student organization based in Jerusalem, he’d left New York for Israel in 2003, currently living with his wife and children in Ma´aleh Adumim,130 an illegal Israeli settlement in Occupied East Jerusalem. Having once made the choice to move with his wife from Brooklyn NY to Israel, he’s trying to convince me that “we have no choice but to be here”. Orenstein tells me that Yad Vashem and “the City of David” together illustrate perfectly why there has to be a Jewish state, and why it has to be here.
The Holocaust museum Yad Vashem, according to Orenstein, tells us that Jews needed their own country, ‘the City of David” tells us that it has to be here. What he explains is without a doubt the actual symbolic function of these two “heritage sites” within the Zionist narrative. By institutionalising visits to these heritage sites by schoolchildren and young army conscripts, one can argue that this is what Hobsbawm and others have identified as “the invention of tradition”131. Such visits become by their constant repetition national traditions aimed at enforcing the national mythology of the State of Israel. While “the City of David” is located inside illegally occupied Palestinian territory, Israeli schoolchildren who visit this site will grow up with a certain emotional attachment to this place, which is later reinforced when they join the army, hereby making this territory’s annexation by Israel an increasingly irreversible fact on the ground.
According to Orenstein, if it wasn’t for “the City of David”, Jews could have founded a country anywhere else in the world “Archaeology proves the Bible happened here, we didn’t choose this place, it is our birthright”. Here he actually turns reality upside down since both archaeology and surrounding infrastructure have actively constructed this visible connection with the Bible, simply illustrated by its new name “the City of David”. The fact that hardly anyone visited this site before Elad took over, although
127 http://www.guidestar.org.il/en/organization/580108660 128 Emek Shaveh's tour of Silwan/”Ir David” by Yonathan Mizrachi 09/11/2014 129Interview with Ze'ev Orenstein, Director of International Affairs Ir David Foundation (Elad); 23/11/2014 130 http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Author.aspx/82 Last consulted on 17/08/2015 131 E. HOBSBAWM & T. RANGER (ed.) (1983); The Invention of Tradition; Cambridge University Press
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the archaeological remains and their significance were known throughout the 20th century, yet now 500.000 tourists visit this site only proves the importance of constructing “a good story” around the remains. As Orenstein unwittingly admitted later on in the interview “The National Parks Authority knew al along about these archaeological remains but didn’t have the money to develop the site for tourists. This is where Elad comes in. Archaeology in itself does not draw tourists, you need infrastructure to make it an easy and nice experience. Also if you don’t know the story you don’t understand the significance.” Since these archaeological remains are anything but impressive by themselves, the importance of infrastructure and “a good story” become even more significant.
As I have explained in chapter 3, religious Israeli settler-colonisers have an obsession with locating Biblical sites, subsequently constructing a brand-new settlement on top or near it, and then using the same name from the Bible in a clear attempt to represent themselves as the direct continuation of the ancient biblical site and its population. These connections clearly do not exist sui generis throughout time, they have to be actively constructed and repeated in the present. Archaeological remains are by their very nature open to interpretation, so if it is the Bible you want to see in those remains then your expectations will certainly be fulfilled. This type of archaeology, of ‘the Bible in one hand, the spade in the other”, has however long lost its last shreds of scientific credibility. Archaeology as a scientific method does not have the power to prove the accuracy of biblical accounts, it has on the contrary been able to disprove many biblical interpretations of the past. While Orenstein and consorts are clearly only interested in archaeology as long as it enforces their religious beliefs, he tries to present himself as a modern rational man by using a discourse concerning “scientific archaeology”. Exploiting archaeological remains for mass tourism fits into a discourse of economic development and progress. These discourses are used by Elad in order to disguise the underlying colonial reality, while legitimising their colonial presence based on archaeology.
When I bring up the point that we are located behind the Green Line, meaning we are in illegally occupied territory, Orenstein quickly brushes this off. The government has declared this a national heritage site. As far as Israel is concerned, this is Israel. Of course the UN would not recognise this, but that doesn’t concern him. “Jerusalem is our capital, that’s all we are concerned about. Archaeology proves that the City of David is here, we have no choice but to be here. This city is 3000 years old, the Green Line means nothing. This city is mainly important for the Jewish people.” He then went on defending his viewpoint with a certain type of reasoning which immediately reminded me of the colonial archaeologists of the 19th century. “Muslim countries don’t respect antiquity” he said confidently “In Israel archaeology is respected.” As further evidence to this he pointed out that over the past 20-30 years many excavations have been made possible thanks to Israel. “If you want archaeology to be safe in the Middle East, you need Israel.”
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5 Conclusion
Archaeology simply can’t legitimise territorial claims of one ethnicity, nation or culture over another. Disputes over territory should be settled through the rule of law, and in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this means by contemporary International and Humanitarian Law. Palestinians got granted official refugee status under International Law which also leads to certain inalienable International Humanitarian Rights. This status of refugee can’t be transferred indefinitely to future generations, a limit is only reasonable, but Zionists claim refugee status since 70 AD. This is an unreasonable demand from a mathematical, historical and judicial perspective. The transportation of civilian populations into occupied territory is strictly prohibited by International Law, meaning that every Israeli citizen who chooses to live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories should be considered an illegal settler-colonist.
Archaeology has a long history for being (ab)used for nationalist, colonialist, capitalist and religious purposes. It being perceived as a “science”, it represents progress and objective neutrality. While exact sciences such as biology and geology are used to lend archaeology such an aura of scientific neutrality, the reality is that every archaeological site lends itself to multiple and sometimes even contradictory readings of the past. Furthermore, its impact on society is always political since it is used to redefine the function of certain spaces and object. While it is generally perceived as a neutral science, and borrows elements of exact sciences to do so, at which layer to stop digging is by itself a reflection of a subjective decision. Mass tourism is equally represented as a bringer of progress and “neutral economic policies”, but turning a nation’s history, culture, and certain spaces into commodities for tourist consumption is again very much a political act. Especially when one asks the question, who benefits from these strategic changes in the usage of space?
Archaeology has the potential to tell different stories about the same space to different kinds of tourists, all depending on how the story is constructed around the archaeological remains. This is why it’s also important to know who the target audience of an archaeological site really is, and how the perceived expectations of this audience has influenced the representation of the archaeological remains. Spaces don’t become archaeological sites or tourist hotspots overnight, they have to be created as such. When a space or object receives an alternate function, who instigates and who benefits from such changes are vital questions to ask when searching for underlying political processes and goals.
Archaeology has the power to influence perceptions about the past, and therefore has also often played a crucial role in shaping the collective history and identity of newly established nation states. In this aspect, Israel is not exceptional in constructing national myths around archaeological sites, and subsequently reconstructing them for tourist consumption once national myths and identity have been well established. As in other colonial projects, archaeology in Israel is/was used to disinherit the present day inhabitants from the history of the land on which they are/were living by only focussing on a distant past which is represented as the original birthplace of the colonisers’ civilisation. Thus severing the historical connection between the land and
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its present day inhabitants by removing or ignoring the layers that directly connect the two. While such political usages of archaeology have been openly and directly supported by both the general Israeli population and its public authorities when considering the pre-‘67 borders, they are now being utilised by religious settlers in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In the West Bank and Occupied East Jerusalem, it are now private settler organisations, such as Elad, with direct and indirect support from the state of Israel, who reconstruct an “archaeological site” into commodities for tourist consumption.
By leaving certain initiatives and responsibilities in the hands of private settler organisations, the Israeli state can somewhat distance itself from the illegal project of Judaizing Occupied East Jerusalem while simultaneously supporting it. Since settler- colonists can’t take over Silwan demographically, mass tourism becomes a strategy to prevent spaces from being used as residential areas by Palestinians and redefining their identity as Jewish, resulting in the Old City of Jerusalem and surrounding areas to be represented as some sort of “biblical Disneyland”. Space is being actively redefined to accomplish this.
What was once Palestinian residential or public space before 1967 was first turned into an Israeli National Park, thus transferring the authority (but not the ownership) over these lands to the National Parks Authority, which is overseen by the Israeli ministry of the environment. Archaeological excavations are then carried out in certain areas, to which scientific credibility is given by the complicity of the Israeli Antiquities Authority and archaeologists from several academic institutions. These excavations are largely funded by the Elad organisation, and therefore by its global network of private donors, the majority of which seem to be wealthy Jewish citizens of the USA. After having completed their “scientific duty”, the archaeologists leave behind an exposed layer, one which incidentally can be connected to a biblical narrative. Subsequently, a narrative and infrastructure to accommodate thousands of tourists on a daily basis is constructed around the archaeological remains, again largely funded by the Elad foundation but in close collaboration with Israeli public authorities. All this leads to a situation where space, which once functioned as a residential or public area for local Palestinians, is now controlled by religious Israeli settlers, and reconstructed in function of international and Israeli tourists of whom a majority expect to see “biblical Jerusalem”, certainly when visiting a space identified as “the City of David”.
All of the above is why I have come to the conclusion that archaeology and mass tourism are being used in Silwan to simultaneously hide and enhance an underlying colonial reality. By connecting themselves to the “scientific” practices and discourses connected to archaeology, and with the “economic” practices and discourses connected to mass tourism, religious fundamentalist settler-colonists attempt to normalise their alien minority-presence within a densely populated Palestinian area. Especially in view of secular international and Israeli tourists who would otherwise instantly dismiss their religious motivations for wanting to illegally occupy these spaces. Consequently, I have come to the conclusion that both archaeology and mass tourism have become useful tools for the Israeli colonisation project, turning both archaeologists and tourists into (sometimes) unwitting accomplices, while simultaneously enabling, enhancing and disguising the political goal of Judaizing Occupied East Jerusalem.
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